Authors: Kamy Wicoff
The two women made their way wordlessly down the hall. At the elevator bank, Dr. Sexton turned left, heading into a section of the building that, though it was on Jennifer’s floor, she had never had the occasion to enter. Dr. Sexton walked very briskly for a 3:00 a.m. jaunt, and Jennifer struggled to keep up with her. They came to the door at the end of the hall. On it were at least six locks, stacked one on top of the other, drug dealer–style.
Watching as Dr. Sexton’s slender hands worked each one of the locks, Jennifer wondered if she lived alone. She had never seen her in the building with anyone but Lucy. At last the door opened, and Dr. Sexton flipped on the lights.
At the newly illuminated threshold, Jennifer stopped and stared. And for a New York minute, every thought of the app vanished in the wake of Jennifer’s shock and awe at the size of Dr. Sexton’s apartment.
“How is it that we live in the same building,” she stammered, “and this your apartment, and my apartment is my apartment?” Taking a few steps inside, she turned her head from side to side, staring at the tall windows, the elegant drapes, the polished hardwood floors, the antiques, the walls of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.
Dr. Sexton made her way into the room, obviously pleased by Jennifer’s admiration. “It is something, isn’t it?” she said. “I had to move in a hurry, but the movers I employed were extremely careful. There are collections here that require the utmost expertise in their handling.” Jennifer attempted to
focus her attention on the objects that Dr. Sexton gestured to proudly: several books and documents under glass, magnificently framed prints, and other instruments and artifacts. But she could not get over the sheer amount of space.
“You must have half the floor!” she said.
“A quarter,” Dr. Sexton replied. “The previous owners consolidated several units.” Dr. Sexton crossed into the open kitchen, gesturing somewhat disdainfully at the Poggenpohl fixtures. “Some of it isn’t to my taste—I prefer a classic six to a loft, and all these fancy fixtures are a little nouveau—but it is more than satisfactory.” Lucy, who was the size of a horse, approached languidly, and Dr. Sexton gave her head a pat. “Would you care for some tea? I bought some exquisite oolong during a recent …” Dr. Sexton paused, seeming to search for the right word. “
Journey.
To Paris.”
At the word
journey
, Jennifer snapped out of her real estate–induced haze.
“Is that what you call it? A journey?” Jennifer said. “The wand … it was all so beautiful, like a game. That’s why I didn’t contact you first. I didn’t think it was real. But then I made an appointment, and then …”
“You traveled in time,” Dr. Sexton said, calmly proceeding with the making of tea, moving through a routine she evidently cherished. “By wormhole.”
Jennifer sat down on a stool across the white marble kitchen island from Dr. Sexton.
“But that’s impossible,” Jennifer said.
“Is it?” Dr. Sexton replied wryly. “More than anything, Jennifer,” she continued, “I want to assure you that it was perfectly safe. I know I behaved recklessly, but I never would have installed it on your phone had I harbored the slightest doubt in that regard.”
“How?” Jennifer managed to ask dumbly.
“How what?” Dr. Sexton asked as the water began to boil. “How does it work, or how are you the only person with whom I have chosen to share it?”
Jennifer noted Dr. Sexton’s use of the term
chosen
. Was there some hope in that? Something Dr. Sexton had seen in her, or in her phone, that had made her want to give the app to Jennifer and nobody else? If there was, maybe Jennifer could convince her to give it back again. But, she thought, first things first. “How does it work?” Jennifer asked. “I put my body through something today, and my mind too. I’d like to know.”
Dr. Sexton took a seat opposite Jennifer, setting two cups of steaming tea to steep between them.
“Have you had any physics?” she asked.
“A little,” Jennifer said, reddening a bit. “The high school kind.”
Dr. Sexton sighed. “I never cared for teaching,” she said. “I’m no good at that Neil deGrasse Tyson ‘physics is for everybody!’ kind of thing.”
“I know what you mean,” Jennifer lied, throwing her new physics crush under the bus in a feeble attempt to establish some physics street cred. “I’m a much bigger fan of the original
Cosmos
. Carl Sagan. You know.”
Dr. Sexton raised an eyebrow, whether approving or disdainful of the Carl Sagan reference, Jennifer could not tell. Sighing, Dr. Sexton squared her shoulders and pinched the bridge of her nose, as though to hold it before embarking on the unpleasant task of giving a very dull person a lecture. “Are you familiar with the concept of a wormhole?” she began.
“I think so,” Jennifer said.
“A wormhole, in essence, is a bridge between two points in space and time. As a concept stemming from the theory of relativity, wormholes are well established. Einstein himself, with a colleague named Nathan Rosen, mathematically proved
their existence. They were originally called Einstein-Rosen bridges but later came to be known as wormholes.” Dr. Sexton used air quotes when saying “wormholes” and rolled her eyes slightly. “It is typical of male physicists,” she said, turning to open a drawer, “to give such an elegant concept such an irredeemably ugly name.” She took out a yellow legal pad and a pen and placed them on the kitchen island. As she talked, she began to draw. “Basically, for reasons it would be too time-consuming to explain here, the theory was that through curvatures in space-time it was possible for one point in space and time”—she drew a funnel shape reminiscent, Jennifer thought, of what she had seen emerge from her phone that day—“to connect directly to another point not only in another place, but at another point in time.” Dr. Sexton drew a second funnel shape, and then a tunnel connecting the two. “Einstein thought these bridges were stable structures, but they were later shown to be unstable—so unstable they would not exist long enough for even a particle of light to traverse them.”
Dr. Sexton’s eyes began to gleam. “Einstein was not the only one who had a misconception about wormholes,” she went on. “The initial belief was that a black hole was necessary for their creation, which made wormholes, for many years, more science fiction than science. In graduate school my interest in them, and in their possible applications for time travel, was treated, to put it mildly, with disdain. The word
eccentric
came up a lot,” Dr. Sexton said, smiling at Jennifer mischievously, “even in my younger years.” Apparently Dr. Sexton suspected Jennifer had used a similar word to describe the Shoe Lady to her boys, and she wasn’t far from wrong: the word had been
unique
. “While there was no question of the theoretical basis for wormholes,” she said, “the difficulty— seemingly insurmountable—was the fact that an infinite, almost incomprehensible amount of energy would be required
to keep a wormhole open long enough for even a photon to traverse it from one set of space-time coordinates to another, let alone a human being.” Returning to her drawing, she took her pen and drew an arrow entering one end of the wormhole, drew a line through the connecting tunnel, and drew another arrow coming out the other side.
“That was until two extraordinary things occurred. The first was the discovery of the Casimir effect. The second was the construction of the Large Hadron Collider, neither of which, I am assuming, you are aware of.” Jennifer admitted she wasn’t. “In order to create a traversable wormhole, it was believed, two things were required: first, wormholes that could, in effect, be ‘caught,’ and second, matter possessed of a negative energy sufficient to provide the repulsive gravity required to keep the wormhole open. The name for the latter kind of matter is much lovelier than
wormhole
. It is known as
exotic energy
.” At this locution Dr. Sexton practically shuddered with pleasure. “The Casimir effect postulated conditions in which negative energy density could be created from quantum foam, the theorized but undetected fundamental fabric of the universe. And I, when I was at last able to conduct experiments using the Large Hadron Collider—the largest particle collider on the planet—discovered a way to detect quantum foam.”
Dr. Sexton paused, letting this evidently awesome achievement sink in, though Jennifer felt woefully unqualified to appreciate it. “From the quantum foam, I harvested wormholes. Using the negative energy of exotic matter, I enlarged and stabilized them, turning a wormhole from a theory into a method of transportation as reliable as the Holland Tunnel.” Smiling, she took a sip of her tea. “And that, my dear, is how it works.”
Jennifer wished she could say it all made sense now, but she felt more confused than ever.
“Sugar?” Dr. Sexton asked brightly, gesturing to her untouched tea. Jennifer nodded.
With a flourish, Dr. Sexton scooped a spoonful of sugar into Jennifer’s cup. When Jennifer made no motion to stir it, Dr. Sexton did it for her.
At last Jennifer found her voice. “My phone is a wormhole.”
“It creates one end of a wormhole. Your destination forms the other.”
Jennifer looked down at her tea and began to stir for herself. “And why hasn’t this been all over the news? Why am I here in the middle of the night, listening to an explanation I can’t even understand? Why doesn’t anybody else know? The people who
should
know?”
“The people who
should
know?” Dr. Sexton repeated, visibly amused. “Nobody else knows, my dear. Just you, and me.”
“Why not? Why me?”
“Why doesn’t anybody else know? Because I don’t want them to. Imagine what would happen to a technology like this if it were to fall, though I’m loath to use such a melodramatic cliché, ‘into the wrong hands’? It is inconceivably frightening. Can you imagine the violence, murder, and spying such a device would enable in the hands of the men who rule this country, or, God forbid, the men who wish to see it destroyed? Technology has made them far too capable of doing damage exponentially disproportionate to their judgment already. It is the last thing I would want to see come of my work. I had all but concluded, in fact, that I would never share my discovery with anyone—until I was inspired, in part, by the evening I spent with your phone. For a moment, anyway, I envisioned a future where the app was put to good use in the hands of women like you, struggling so mightily under the burdens of modern life.” Jennifer considered this. If she got the app back,
could she be trusted to use it wisely, and well? She wouldn’t start any wars with it, to be sure, but there would certainly be other temptations. “Which leads me directly to your second question: Why you? The answer to that is both more complicated and more straightforward for me to explain.
“The simple explanation,” Dr. Sexton went on, “is that it was fate. An extraordinary stroke of fate! I’ve come to believe in such things much more as I’ve grown older, though I must confess I’ve always had a mystical streak, like many another brilliant scientist. None other than Marie Curie believed that spirits could communicate from the dead. Science and magic have always been intertwined. As Arthur C. Clarke said, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Part of the reason for the wand, you know.” At the thought of the wand, Dr. Sexton permitted herself an unreserved look of pleasure—as close as a woman like her ever came to a silly grin, Jennifer thought, as she smiled too. “And then there is how it actually came about, which was in the most ordinary of ways.
“Last night, I was out walking Lucy very late—keeping these sorts of hours, as I often do,” she said, waving at a grandfather clock in the corner of the living room, “and was just about to enter the lobby of our building, when a taxicab pulled up at the door.” Jennifer immediately felt a stab of guilt, recalling her mental cursing of the cab driver that morning. “He wanted to know if I lived in the building. I told him I did, and he asked if I might give your phone to the doorman. Then he told me your name and your apartment number. How did he know that, by the way?”
“I have an entry in my address book,
If Found
, with an asterisk so it’s the first thing.”
“How clever,” Dr. Sexton said. Suddenly, she clapped her hands together loudly and the sound of an aria came from the
direction of her couch. Dr. Sexton walked over to it, picked up her phone, and silenced it. “I use the clapper!” she laughed. “For my senior moments.” It was a bit difficult to reconcile the clapper with a woman who was evidently the peer of Einstein, though not so difficult if Jennifer thought of her as the Shoe Lady.
“What happened then?” Jennifer asked.
“By the time your phone came into my possession, it was dead. As soon as I charged it, however, and saw your home screen, I knew that Jennifer Sharpe was
you
. My neighbor.” Dr. Sexton smiled. “I’ve become quite fond of you and your boys during the short time I’ve been here,” she added. “It’s been a lonely period for me. Your boys, with their energy and jostling and endless knock-knock jokes in the elevator, not to mention Jack’s lovely way with Lucy, are an enlivening diversion I have very much come to look forward to.” Dr. Sexton had likely observed her boys more often than she had realized, Jennifer thought, particularly at the park, where the boys played on the playground and Dr. Sexton often let Lucy off leash in the adjoining dog run. “And you, my dear,” Dr. Sexton said, her voice pitching lower. “You are quite remarkable with them. I had a very distant mother. She was practically a stranger to me. Watching you—your naturalness, your humor, your patience as you teach them things—it has been a revelation to me.” At this, much to Jennifer’s surprise, she found herself on the receiving end of an expression of great sympathy and affection. Only her mother had ever looked at her that way. It was eerie, but, a motherless daughter now, she could not help feeling warmed by it.
“But then there was your phone! Speak of a revelation!” Dr. Sexton cried. “I hope you don’t mind that I deduced your password,” she confided sheepishly. “I can’t help myself with that sort of thing. You might consider changing it from your
apartment number combined with the inverse of your birthday, which is something even a common fool could work out with a bit of help from the Internet.” Jennifer made a mental note never to leave her phone unattended in Dr. Sexton’s presence again. “I didn’t read any of your e-mails, rest assured. I just observed that there were thousands of them. I had no idea such a thing was possible. Thousands! And your calendar! The number of entries was staggering—to me, anyway, childless and free as I am of familial obligations or the traditional constraints of work, particularly of the barbaric American two-weeks-of-vacation variety—one after another after the next! It looked like a presidential candidate’s agenda on her last day in Iowa, not a minute unaccounted for, morning to night. Even its cracked case,” she said, glancing fondly at the battered phone resting on the table, “signaled a life overrun with both mundane tasks and urgent, unrelenting pressures at work and at home. I’ve read about this sort of thing, in the
Times
. Life of the modern woman,
Lean In
and all that. But to see it spelled out in the life of someone I’ve come to care about …” Dr. Sexton reached across the kitchen island and took Jennifer’s hand. “And that’s when I knew. I knew
you
were the one this app was for. That you, more than any teenage Cinderella, truly deserved to be granted a wish. And a feeling came over me. I wanted to be the one to grant it.”