We found flaws in the theory, Jim and I.
You can't stop it once you get there. Standing in your lab coat, in front of a microscope, the doubt overshadows all the collected data.
Nothing became reliable.
The things Jim had finally written down in pen, started to shift-- in my mind-- back to pencil. To notebooks full of "wrong".
"Well you wrote the ratios down wrong in December. Is that the date we have to go back to and start over from there?" He glared at me.
"Well you were sloppy with the solids, so maybe we should go back to then, to November?" I accused him.
Back at the apartment, at night, something as simple as cracking eggs into a pan became doubtful. I felt as if the pan might collapse in my hand, or the egg wouldn't change from raw to cooked. It might just sit there and stare at me, from on top of the little fire bursting from the range.
"No," I said, because I knew the rules. It had to change from runny clear to bleach white and so forth. That was the given.
We started over at October's numbers, angrily, and started cutting the project in half, laying it out in more increments, taking persistent pictures, and writing our notes explicitly and videotaping the extra miles we were going.
We pictured going back to real life one day, to listening to our loved ones when they spoke to us. To trying to put contacts in our eyes, and show up at barbeques, and email our old co workers back because they'd asked about the project weeks ago. Or months ago?
Family vacation?
Dentist appointments?
They'd escaped us.
All that we saw was the science, and the gravity holding us there.
"If I knew the answers, Jim, I'd tell you," I said, one day, sipping my burnt coffee and staring at the wall while he spouted off rhetorical questions.
I wanted to take a break. To feel sunlight. To clean my car. To grow a garden instead.
But there was the pressure calling in everyday, with the money, to make sure that we didn't have a life.
There was the need to know, where this was all going.
And that's how we figured it out, Jim and I.
After 11 months, and that's why you're still sitting here, still able to buy your food at the grocery store, and to count on the clocks to keep time.
It's because of what Jim and I did, and the life we gave.
You'll never know, and we'll never be able to tell you.
The whole story is more unrealistic than this.
