Heisesnberg’s Daughter

She may still be out there somewhere. I hear rumors now and then. Moscow, or Cape Town, or Jackson Hole. She’s the kind of person who could be in any of those places. She could be anywhere. Her potential is everywhere; I feel it every time I walk into a room. Maybe this will be the time I see her again. Until I scan the room, listen for her laugh, there is a very real part of her there with me. But she is never there; where I am is the only place in the world she’s not. Then I will hear someone mention they saw her at a bar in the Frankfurt airport, a flash of light and laughter, a drink and a smoke and a story, and for one brief moment she will have a location, before leaving to catch a flight to no specific place, just out there somewhere. It must be lonely to be a wave when the rest of us all act like particles.

Or, she may be dead. Perhaps it is Schroedinger I should be invoking. That’s my girl; both dead and alive, and everywhere all at once. Everywhere, of course, except here. I expect I’ll never see her again. I’ve told that to the police, but they’re not yet convinced.

“How can she just leave you after all that?” one detective asked me. I didn’t bother to answer. If he ever meets her he’ll undestand. She left the same way she arrived; without warning she appeared out of nowhere, then just as abruptly she was gone, leaving my little apartment quieter than it ever had been before — if you don’t count the explosion and the nearly-incessant visits by various sorts of law enforcement officers, and other, less savory inquisitors. The explosion was minor; it’s the police that are the most annoying. I tell them all the same thing. She’s gone. All she left behind was a faint scent of exotic perfume, a t-shirt that says “Bite Me – please”, and a single red Chuck Taylor low-top. I never saw her wearing the shoes, I suspect she had already left the other somewhere in her wake. The cops carefully bagged the shirt and the shoe, and took my trash with them for good measure. My favorite carving knife is missing, but I don’t think the police took it. Perhaps the shoe was meant as an exchange.

I didn’t tell them about the sunglasses. Cheap Ray-Ban ripoffs with tooth marks on the earpieces. She used them while driving, but she spent more time with them hanging out of her mouth than wearing them normally. There’s nothing special about the shades, no reason to withhold them except that they were mine before they were hers. The lenses are a bit scratched up, but I still wear them sometimes. When I do, I feel like a gangster.