Connie Willis - At The Rialto

The restaurant was next door to Grauman’s Chinese, which made me a little nervous, but it had eggs and bacon and toast and orange juice and coffee. And donuts.

“I thought you were having breakfast with Dr. Thibodeaux and Dr. Hotard,” I said, dunking one in my coffee. “What happened to them?”

“They went to Forest Lawn. Dr. Hotard wanted to see the church where Ronald Reagan got married.”

“He got married at Forest Lawn?”

He took a bite of my donut. “In the Wee Kirk of the Heather. Did you know Forest Lawn’s got the World’s Largest Oil Painting Incorporating a Religious Theme?”

“So why didn’t you go with them?”

“And miss the movie?” He grabbed both my hands across the table. “There’s a matinee at two o’clock. Come with me.”

I could feel things starting to collapse. “I have to get back,” I said, trying to disentangle my hands. “There’s a panel on the EPR paradox at two o’clock.”

“There’s another showing at five. And one at eight.”

“Dr. Gedanken’s giving the keynote address at eight.”

“You know what the problem is?” he said, still holding on to my hands. “The problem is, it isn’t really Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, it’s Mann’s, so Sid isn’t even around to ask. Like, why do some pairs like Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman share the same square and other pairs don’t? Like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire?”

“You know what the problem is?” I said, wrenching my hands free. “The problem is you don’t take anything seriously. This is a conference, but you don’t care anything about the programming or hearing Dr. Gedanken speak or trying to understand quantum theory!” I fumbled in my purse for some money for the check.

“I thought that was what we were talking about,” David said, sounding surprised. “The problem is, where do these lion statues that guard the door fit in? And what about all those empty spaces?”

I went up to my room as soon as I got back to the Rialto to see if Darlene was there yet. She wasn’t, and when I tried to call the desk, the phone wouldn’t work. I went back down to the registration desk. There was no one there. I waited fifteen minutes and then went into the panel on the EPR paradox.

“The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox cannot be reconciled with quantum theory,” Dr. Takumi was saying. “I don’t care what the experiments seem to indicate. Two electrons at opposite ends of the universe can’t affect each other simultaneously without destroying the entire theory of the space-time continuum.”

She was right. Even if it was possible to find a model of quantum theory, what about the EPR paradox? If an experimenter measured one of a pair of electrons that had originally collided, it changed the cross-correlation of the other instantaneously, even if the electrons were light-years apart. It was as if they were eternally linked by that one collision, sharing the same square forever, even if they were on opposite sides of the universe.

“If the electrons communicated instantaneously, I’d agree with you,” Dr. Iverson said, “but they don’t, they simply influence each other. Dr. Shimony defined this influence in his paper on passion, and my experiment clearly—”

I thought of David leaning over me between the best pictures of 1944 and 1945, saying, “I think we know as much about quantum theory as we do about May Robson from her footprints.”

“You can’t explain it away by inventing new terms,” Dr. Takumi said.

“I completely disagree,” Dr. Ping said. “Passion at a distance is not just an invented term. It’s a demonstrated phenomenon.”

It certainly is, I thought, thinking about David taking the macrocosmic menu out of the window and saying, “The sea-urchin pat é looks good.” It didn’t matter where the electron went after the collision. Even if it went in the opposite direction from Hollywood and Vine, even if it stood a menu in the window to hide it, the other electron would still come and rescue it from the radicchio and buy it a donut.

“A demonstrated phenomenon!” Dr. Takumi said. “Ha!” She banged her moderator’s gavel for emphasis.

“Are you saying passion doesn’t exist?” Dr. Ping said, getting very red in the face.

“I’m saying one measly experiment is hardly a demonstrated phenomenon.”

“One measly experiment! I spent five years on this project!” Dr. Iverson said, shaking his fist at her. “I’ll show you passion at a distance!”

“Try it, and I’ll adjust your fractal-basin boundaries! ” Dr. Takumi said, and hit him over the head with the gavel.

I went up to my room before the police came. Darlene still wasn’t there, and the phone and air-conditioning still weren’t working. I was really beginning to get worried. I walked up to Grauman’s Chinese to find David, but he wasn’t there. Dr. Whedbee and Dr. Sleeth were behind the Academy Award winners folding screen.

“You haven’t seen David, have you?” I asked.

Dr. Whedbee removed his hand from Norma Shearer’s cheek.

“He left,” Dr. Sleeth said, disentangling herself from the Best Movie of 1929-30.

“He said he was going out to Forest Lawn,” Dr. Whedbee said, trying to smooth down his bushy white hair.

“Have you seen Dr. Mendoza? She was supposed to get in this morning.”

They hadn’t seen her, and neither had Drs. Hotard and Thibodeaux, who stopped me in the lobby and showed me a postcard of Aimee Semple McPherson’s tomb. Tiffany had gone off duty. Natalie couldn’t find my reservation. I went back up to the room to wait, thinking Darlene might call.

The air conditioning still wasn’t fixed. I fanned myself with a Hollywood brochure and then opened it up and read it. There was a map of the courtyard of Grauman’s Chinese on the back cover. Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner didn’t have a square together either, and Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy weren’t even on the map. She made him waffles in Woman of the Year, and they hadn’t even given them a square. I wondered if Tiffany the model-slash-actress had been in charge of assigning the cement. I could see her looking blankly at Spencer Tracy and saying, “I don’t show a reservation for you.”

What exactly was a model-slash-actress? Did it mean she was a model or an actress or a model and an actress? She certainly wasn’t a hotel clerk. Maybe electrons were the Tiffanys of the microcosm, and that explained their wave-slash-particle duality. Maybe they weren’t really electrons at all. Maybe they were just working part-time at being electrons to pay for their singlet-state lessons.

Darlene still hadn’t called by seven o’clock. I stopped fanning myself and tried to open a window. It wouldn’t budge. The problem was, nobody knew anything about quantum theory. All we had to go on were a few colliding electrons that nobody could see and that couldn’t be measured properly because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. And there was chaos to consider, and entropy, and all those empty spaces. We didn’t even know who May Robson was.