Simon Kearns

He was running and running and running, and when he thought he couldn’t run any more, he carried on running. And all the people came out onto the streets to watch him running, and they said, there he goes, running and running. And he ran right out of this country and into the next one. But they don’t care for running in that country and I couldn’t say what became of him.

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.

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 a ridiculously 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 was told, take him round the back and deal with him. I mean, there’s no ambiguity in that, is there? Everybody knows what that means. He knew what it meant. He didn’t struggle, didn’t plead. He was meek as a lamb. Hurrying almost, as if he couldn’t wait for it to be over. He was leading me. All I could think about was how tight the cord was on his wrists, that it must really hurt, that his hands were turning white. It was my first day, you know? I wasn’t gonna go making a scene. I mean, this is what we signed up for. Really.

Funny, though, cos I saw him a week later on Al Jazeera. Somebody must have moved him, cos he was face down when I left him. Seeing him on TV helped, actually. Made it more unreal. Anyway, I’d already quit by then.

Polaroid art - Donald Ng

I am convinced it is the song of cicadas that regulate temperature and not the other way around.

I say, those dancers remind me of Buenos Aires, and they say, they’re not dancers, granddad, they’re statues.

But I see them dance.

In the shimmer of siesta I see their angles and elbows move, counter clockwise, and from between them, flanked by an ocho and a quebrada, come the men in grey coats, defined not so much by the colour of their clothes, but by their bodies ignorance of the music, the clumsy shape of their walking as they approach.

The music stops, the dancers break the embrace. Strong hands on my arms. The band is applauded and I know that Teresa is dead.

Windowless rooms, screams, the taste of blood.

Nothing they did to me could hurt as much as the hands upon my arms that day in the Milonga. The realisation that you were gone. My dear sweet Teresa, you knew the risk, but you were not afraid.

Are you okay granddad?

What? Yes. I am fine. It’s the heat. It reminds me of home.