Schrodinger's Gat Read Online Free PDF

looking forward to seeing you. So don’t do anything that would significantly decrease the odds of you making it.”
    I smile and she shuts the door. I have the driver take me to my car.

     
    Part Two: Particles and Waves
    I get in my little blue Ford Focus and drive home. Home is a dingy one-bedroom apartment a couple miles from the BART station with an air mattress on the floor. Deb got the house. I’m not sure how that happened. She left me . Why don’t I get the house? The kids, right. She gets the kids, the kids stay in the house, I get to sleep on the floor next to a stack of cardboard boxes. Fuck.
    I arrest this train of thought and go back to thinking about Tali, trying to prolong the high I felt while talking with her in the cab. On some level I ’m aware that it’s a little morbid to be so thrilled about meeting Tali, considering the circumstances of our meeting. The adrenaline and endorphins and hormones and whatever else are all mixed up in my brain; it’s hard to say exactly what I’m feeling and why. Above all I feel alive , which is something I haven’t felt for some time. Am I simply infatuated with Tali, or is the intensity of my feelings related to the excitement of the day? Maybe, I think, this is just what it’s like to be around Tali. However she did what she did, this clearly wasn’t the first time. I wonder how often she does that sort of thing. Is it some kind of job? Does she get up in the morning and check her phone to see what tragedy she needs to prevent that day? Does she do this on her own or does she work for someone? I realize that I actually know very little about her. I don’t even know her last name.
    What does it feel like to hold people ’s lives in your hands? To know that you’re actually helping people, making a real difference in the world? When I was a kid, I dreamed about being a cop or a firefighter, somebody who saved lives, somebody who made a difference, but at some point I decided I wasn’t cut out for that sort of life. I took the road less traveled, decided to be a novelist, and that has made all the difference: I’m a divorced high school English teacher living in a shitty apartment in San Leandro. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a teacher, but I’m not one of those teachers who gets thanked during a former student’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. I’m the teacher whose classes are filled with kids who drew the short stick when scheduling their electives. I fell into teaching because I figured I could tolerate it for a few years while I worked on getting my novel published. That was fourteen years and three novels ago. I’ve pretty much given up on making any kind of difference in the world.
    The idea of “making a difference” goes both ways, of course. That psycho with the shotgun on the pier thought he was making a difference too. That’s the easy way. When you’ve given up on trying to accomplish anything positive, you can always cause mayhem. Tough luck for that asshole that Tali was there to stop him.
    On some level I can understand that sort of thinking, the desperation to have some kind of effect on the world, even if it ’s just destruction. Instant fame, or infamy, and these days what’s the difference? As low as I’ve gotten, at least I had the decency to try to check out without taking anyone with me. My legacy would have been making a few hundred commuters late for work one day. And hey, at least they’d have had an interesting story to tell their co-workers. But Tali foiled that plan too.
    I pour myself a drink, boot up my laptop and open my latest abortive attempt at a novel. I guess I’m thinking that maybe the rush from the day’s excitement will translate into inspiration, or at least motivation, but it doesn’t work out that way. In fact, instead of my mood helping me to write, the inertia of the unfinished novel seems to be oozing out of the screen into my body, threatening to quash whatever is left of my