Simon Kearns

The trouble started when the Higgs Boson particle was finally discovered. The God Particle, as the press so loved to call it. I guess they were right. With the Higgs Field measured and malleable, some genius thought it would be a good idea to try to puncture it. Let me quote you from the UN report. “To date, an area of forty-three cubic kilometres has fallen into the Higgs Field Event. The anomaly has been stable for twenty-three days, with no further sign of enlargement.” In other words, our world has stopped going down the plughole. We hope.

I have seen what remains of the CERN laboratory, of the forty-three cubic kilometres of Switzerland, including villages, farms, and much of Geneva, swallowed by the event. Despite the horror, it’s a beautiful thing. I got my first glimpse while flying into Annecy Airport. From thirty kilometres away it looked like an obscenely giant marble, stuck into the ground. A hemisphere of changing colours, flashes, rainbows. Up close was even better. An ever-swirling play of light and colour, insanely big, insanely spherical.

They say there’s nothing in there but random particles. No mass, no cohesion, nothing but chaos. They say lots of things, but really they don’t know what is going on. They’re afraid to do anything to it in case it starts to grow again. Standing in front of it, I was tempted to touch it. I remember a smell, but it wasn’t so much a smell, more of a tingling in the nostrils, citrus-like, without the scent.

The security perimeter was reassuring, in a pitiable way. I was there in my capacity as a representative of the UN’s Disaster Relief Committee. During my visit, a delegation from the Pentagon was being given a tour.

I like to sit outside a marriage counsellor’s and watch the couples come and go. There’s a café across the road, I take a window seat and do crosswords. The appointments are regular, business is good. Strong emotion (4). There goes a duo now, they’re going in; she brisk, he exaggerated in his movement, sarcastic compliance. They’ll be out in an hour. They always come out different. Whether it’s working or not, they come out different from how they went in. Love? Matches the E from scale. But then, so would hate. If scale is right.

The marriage counsellor works out of one of those tall Georgian houses that remind me of tall, well-dressed men in top hats. The plaque on the wall says, Karen Massey, Marriage and Family Counselling, second floor. I picture that couple just gone in, taking the stairs, perhaps her briskness flagging, his mannerisms tamed.

Scale has to be right, it fits with carousel and bean.

The café serves a passable coffee but the cheesecake more than makes up for it. Baked raspberry and lemon, blueberry and soured cream, caramel and fleur de sel.

When the couple reappear I can see they’ve been through the ringer. There’s a new awareness of each other though it’s too soon to tell if it is optimistic or wounded. They are hiding it. The wariness is evident in the distance between them, a formality that could be the result of a conciliatory reappraisal. Or not. That said, they set off in unison, slightly rigid, with heads high.

Of course, small rodent would be vole, which puts an L at the start of the four-lettered word.

The next couple arrive separately. An hour later they emerge, expressions changed. As I suspect, they go off in different directions.

When, as punishment, they left him behind, they gave him enough food for a only day or two. However, they made sure he had plenty of vellum and ink. No one thought he would last long. Regardless, he set to work. Thanks to careful rationing, and the discovery of a stream on the second day, he was able to keep himself alive longer than expected. Having made it to the mountains, he climbed one of the lower peaks and the aspect of the interior became, to some extent, apparent: a vast plain, cut through by a river which rose somewhere in the range. The flatland disappeared into a hazy horizon.

With a fervent concentration, he sketched out as much as he could see of the mountain range, the way it curved to the north. The serrated spine of peaks formed a frame along the bottom and right hand side of the vellum. Soon, the immensity of the interior took up all of his attention; it spread across the page as a terrible swathe of emptiness. It offended him, this emptiness.

On the sixth day, hunger caused to him to envisage the plain filled with farms and settlements, fat cattle and full granaries. In a delusive state he began to add these fantasies to the map, going so far as to name the tribes that clung to the meandering river. The nearest settlement was populated by the Canuhak, a peaceful clan who reared cattle and created messages to their gods by laying out stones in enormous glyphs only the sky-dwellers could read. From his position in the mountains, he could see these symbols, and he carefully recreated them on the vellum. When the Canuhak found him up there, they took him for a messenger of the gods and made him offerings of meat, gold and precious stones. He ate, grew strong, and was able to descend to the plain and join the tribe in a ritual of dance and feasting.

It was impossible to tell how long he stayed with them, learning their customs, adopting their dress, making careful observations in iron gall ink of everything they taught him. Sheets of vellum were filled with notes, drawings, and phonetic renderings of their staccato language. When he died, his wife and children were joined in mourning by the entire tribe. They did not burn or bury their dead, but practiced excarnation, and so his body was left on the other side of the mountains, surrounded by his favourite belongings, his texts.

His own people eventually returned. They found his bones and the rolls of vellum. They read it all and, spurred on by the promise of a society rich in gold and precious stones, sent out a great expedition across the plain to find the Canuhak. None of them survived.

By the time I got back to the island only Henson was still alive. He didn’t speak; the gun said it all. He motioned me to the prison and locked me in a cage.

“Quarantine,” he muttered at last, as if now that I was contained it was safe to talk.

“The others?”

“All dead. Burnt their bodies.”

He was exhausted, eyes sunken into his skull, shrinking from the horrors he had no doubt witnessed.

“And you?”

He sneered. “I sat in the church tower with this.” The gun.

Three days, he told me. Three days and I’d be dead if infected. He gave me food and water and inspected me through the bars of the cage. He moved slowly. His eyes were rheumy. That night he came again.

On the second day he didn’t turn up ‘til near sunset. His walk was slower, his hands trembled the rations he carried.

“Henson,” I said, “you look sick.”

He ignored me, set the food and water by the cage, and walked away shaking his head.

“Let me out. I’m not infected. Henson! Let me out!”

The third day came and went. He never returned.

When the tyrant Peisistratos announced he would pay his weight in gold to the man who could show him verifiable evidence of a physical paradox, conjurers, swindlers, and madmen flocked to Athens to claim the prize.

An office was set up to handle the crowd, and I, Petros Kleitos, senior magistrate, was charged with finding the impossible.

After a few days the initial rush abated, but a steady stream of hopefuls continued to appear as the news spread from city to city. They were laughable, the lot of them. One I remember, a money-changer from Sikyon, claimed to have a stone that could multiply whatever it touched. I asked him how he carried it, he told me there were fifteen of him. When I asked to meet him all at once, he didn’t come back. Another, a sprightly seventy-three-year old mariner from Akragas, declared the ability to make the moon sway. He could only do it when standing on a ship.

One day, a young man came to see me. He told me he was a disciple of Pythagoreanism and he was breaking the vows of his order in visiting me. I offered him wine, but he refused. He gave me a concise outlay of his beliefs, namely, there exist the limited and the unlimited. Without both, we would have nothing, for, in his example, it is the gaps between one, two, and three that distinguish them. He then produced an object from his bag.

It was made of wood and I remember basic shapes, a circle, a triangle within it, a square, each a plane, intersecting the others. He held the thing in front of me and began to turn it.

I will admit I had drunk a lot that afternoon; I am a magistrate, it’s part of the job. But what I saw next – what happened when he had completed half a turn, it would be better to deem it an effect of the wine.

A space opened in the middle of the object, simply opened. Inside there was nothing. Understand, though, by nothing I do not mean the lack of something, I mean a bottomless void, a thing so dark I noticed the room begin to dim. It was not possible to look away. I could feel the pull of it, every part of me leaning towards it, and I had to fight with all my strength to keep from throwing myself at it.

He turned it back, the void closed, and I collapsed in my seat, exhausted. I could see by his face that he was regretting his actions. He quickly dismantled the object, put it in the bag, and left without a word. I tried to stand, but was still too weak from the experience.

I never saw him again. After much deliberation, I decided not to tell anyone of these events. I write them now, old and regretful, soon to meet that void once more.