Skippy Dies

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Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg – that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you’d imagined, that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing the dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor-tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of ‘life’. Now, with every day that passes, another door seems to close, the one marked PROFESSIONAL STUNTMAN, or FIGHT EVIL ROBOT, until as the weeks go by and the doors – GET BITTEN BY SNAKE, SAVE WORLD FROM ASTEROID, DISMANTLE BOMB WITH SECONDS TO SPARE – keep closing, you begin to hear the sound as a good thing, and start closing some yourself, even ones that didn’t necessarily need to be closed…

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See, there are two big theories of how the universe works. On the one hand you have the quantum mechanical explanation, the Standard Model as it’s called, which says that everything is made of very small things – particles. There are hundreds of different kinds of particle, it’s all very frenetic and weird and disparate – bitty, as you say. Then, on the other hand, there’s Einstein’s relativistic account, which is very geometric and elegant and deals with the universe on a grand scale. Light and gravity are caused by ripples in spacetime, everything’s ruled by these very simple laws – it’s nothing but overarching structure, in short. The thing is, though both explanations are, as far as we can work out, right, neither one works on its own. The curved space account goes to pieces when it runs into subatomic particles. The Standard Model is too chaotic and confused to get us to the big elegant symmetries of spacetime. So neither one is complete, and when you need to use both at the same time, like when you’re trying to describe the Big Bang, they won’t fit together. It’s the same thing you’re talking about – you know, on a quotidian level, it’s difficult to find any evidence of a narrative arc or a larger meaning in your life, but at the same time, if you try and give your life a meaning – like live according to a principle or a mission or an ideal or whatever – then inevitably you distort the details. The small things keep agitating against it and popping out of place. Every couple of years some scientist comes along with the grand unified theory that supposedly ties everything together. String theory, supergravity. M-theory is the latest. But when you look closer they always fall to pieces.’

Howard gazes at him deadpan. ‘That’s not actually very comforting, Farley.’