When Time Ran Crooked

25 hours, 14 minutes, and 46 seconds Until

"What did you say your cat's name was again?" 

"Angus," I told him. 

"Why Angus?"

I shrugged. "Why not? I mean, he sort of looked like an Angus, I guess. The name just sort of seems to suit him. What's about your cat?"

"His name is Rody."

"Rody?'

"You say that like you don't believe me."

"It's not that I don't believe," I explained, quickly. "It's just that, well, I was expecting something a little more . . . academic, I guess. Like something named after Albert Einstein or Sir Isaac Newton or Marie Curie o-"

"But he is," he retorted. 

"Is what?"

"Rody is short for Schrodinger," he informed me. "You know, after Erwin Schrodinger's famous experiment in the 1930's which illustrated the quantum theory of superposition."

I scowled. "The . . . what?"

"You've never heard of Schrodinger's cat?" Claude demanded, his eyes widening as if I told him I were a pink giraffe with a habit of dressing up as a clown every Wednesday. 

"Look, science wasn't exactly my strong suit," I reasoned. 

"Well, basically, the experiment was designed to reveal the difference, and conflict, between the microscopic and macroscopic fie-"

"How about we skip the science-y part and you just tell me about the cat?" I suggested. 

Claude shared a small smile with me, before quickly tucking it away. "Basically, Schrodinger put a living cat in a steel chamber with a vial of hydrocyanic acid and locked it up. During the testing, if even a single atom of the hydrocyanic acid decayed, then a device would be triggered to break the vial and, thus, kill the cat. Since no one could see into the chamber, Schrodinger proposed the idea that the cat must be considered both dead and alive at the same time. This idea was radical at the time for suggesting tha-"

"Wait, so you named your cat after one that might have died for the sake of science?" I asked. 

"I named my cat for the universe," he insisted. "Schrodinger's cat was both dead and alive at the same time. Life and death are antonyms, they stand as polar opposites from each other. Yet this experiment was able to hook these two opposites into one, to make these two contradictions live in harmony with one another. This experiment broke the order of the universe, while also expanding our knowledge of it. It broke tradition, it broke science, it broke time. So of course I named my cat after it."

Claude looked at me now with wide, passionate blue eyes. And I wondered if it was with this level of frenzy that Claude faced every matter, every conversation, every decision in his life- and I wondered what it was like to live that way. To live breaking the order of the universe. 

"You're crazy," I told him.

But the truth was, it seemed crazier to me that I had only known Claude Martin for three days. It seemed like I had known him for as long as I could remember. 

I had always thought of time as a linear pathway, stretching and on and on in the same direction for eternity. But, being here with Claude, it was like time ran crooked. Like every second had multiplied into an hour and every hour into a day and every day into a year . . . everything small became large with Claude Martin, and time seemed to pass in different ways with him. 

And despite that relatively short amount of time, he had gotten to see me in ways most people didn't get to: devastatingly depressed, hopeless, cynical, nostalgic, drunk, a little horny, goofy ... happy. Even here, in this dark, icy world, where our survival seemed less and less certain the longer time passed, I felt it. A tiny spark of warmth underneath, an inextinguishable flame growing bolder and hotter and large as it flickered in my stomach, while I lied in Claude's arms.