The Intangible

by C.J. Washington

People with Capgras syndrome falsely believed a loved one had been replaced by an imposter.

He stared into his empty bowl, wishing he hadn’t said anything. Whenever he acted, it turned out badly. Doing nothing was the rational strategy. He would have to learn to sit idly by while his life fell apart. That had to be better than manning the wrecking ball.

“Sometimes it’s about faith. Believing that something bigger than yourself is putting you where you need to be.”

“It’s the idea in theoretical physics that multiple universes exist,” Frederick explained. “Every time a quantum particle changes state, every state it could possibly assume generates a new universe. In other words, everything that can possibly happen, happens. The differences play out in different universes.”

When the world is inexplicable, our explanations are apt to be creative.

“I believe that one true objective reality exists. A full understanding of that reality is beyond our reach, however, so we construct narratives, approximations of reality. We collect rules, like ‘Good guys always win,’ and they become the framework for our narratives. Fiction genres, for example, have different rules. In an action story, a character can jump onto the roof of a speeding car and just hang out there until he debilitates the driver, shimmies his way behind the wheel, and coasts into the sunset. In a romance, that might kill our hero, but the same guy could make love all night without bathroom or water breaks.

And small shifts in rules can lead to large differences in narratives.” “Chaos theory,” Amanda said. “The butterfly effect.”

There are things I believed ten years ago that seem crazy to me now. But my change in perspective can be explained by small shifts in the rules I accept.”

When I said that people can get creative in the face of the inexplicable, I meant that we’re skilled at adopting new rules to expand our narrative structure. I don’t believe in ghosts. If I see one, I can either add a rule that nullifies my senses, or I can add a rule that permits the supernatural. I may not know which is true, so I have to choose. I think people tend to be self-serving in those choices. We see the world as we want to see it.”

“You know how when you’re trying to solve a problem, you can mull over it for days with no progress, and then suddenly, even though you haven’t learned anything new, the answer comes to you?” He nodded. “Insight.” “Exactly. Insight. How does the brain do that?” He stared at her for a long while. She stared back, as if they were both waiting for insight to find him. “I have no idea,” he said finally,

“Let’s return to the right hemisphere and coarse semantic coding. Your subconscious is working on the problem. Your left hemisphere is strongly activating nearby memories. These might be the obvious solutions, which aren’t working. Your right hemisphere, meanwhile, is weakly activating memories with less relevance. And suddenly, it hits on a nonobvious solution to the problem. This is your insight. The answer was in your mind all along, but it wasn’t activated immediately because it isn’t stored near any concepts in your problem. The really cool thing is that people who tend to solve problems by insight have more widespread activation in the right hemisphere, even at rest. So if you really want to be good at solving problems with insight, your right hemisphere should have broad activation. I can’t tell you how to make that happen, but there it is.”

Inside of that, he would find a woman who loved with a ferocity that nature had never intended.

He went to bed shortly after hanging up with Amanda, still clinging to her words. He didn’t know what they meant, but he felt a warm glow as he undressed. I wish I could see you.

His father, in his memories, took the form of a monster, and somehow, as Patrick had grown toward manhood, a piece of that monster had been assimilated into him. It used to haunt him. It had affected his relationships with women.

You can never know if a marriage is going to last forever. The best you can do is marry someone who has your back.

she felt as if she were scooping it from unvisitable regions of the cosmos, like water from the sea. She could drink and drink and never be sated. The magic was in the intangibility of it.

The magic, Patrick would say, is in the unconscious processing. You are your brain, and yet, so much of what it does happens beyond your awareness. It does its work unbeknownst to you and then passes you the fruits of its labor. That’s magic.

He felt so lonely sometimes that thoughts of her were the only thing that kept him from drowning in it.

The mere existence of these grand bodies, the sun and the moon, made anything seem possible.

“Start by keeping the lines of communication open. You have to keep talking to her.” “It’s hard. Especially since she used to love me. I can’t bear the way she looks at me.” “You have to. One day, when she’s no longer a teenager and the hormones have leveled and her prefrontal cortex is fully developed, she’s going to think of you. She’ll think you’re a jerk for cheating on her mom, but don’t let her think you’re a jerk for abandoning her. Let her hate you. Embrace her as she hates you. Be there for every moment of it.” “I don’t know how to talk to her.” “Figure it out. Even as we get older, we make choices that define who we are. Your relationship with Julie twenty years from now could hinge on the choices you make today. Call her in the morning. Tell her you love her.”

“If she won’t talk to you,” Rob said, “find someone she will talk to. Do something.” “The surgeon’s motto.” “If you were bleeding out right now, it might be an opportune moment to talk about the purpose of life and the meaning of death, but you wouldn’t want me to do that. You would want me to take life-preserving action. Even if it failed. You would want action.”

Time moved incessantly in one direction. As desperately as she tried, it was impossible to connect in a meaningful way to the past because she was no longer the person who’d experienced that past. She’d moved forward, and her existence could only be realized in the present. Defeat.

She paused to read a sign: PLEASE STAY ON THE TRAIL. She stared at the sign, blue with white lettering. She could let her vision go out of focus. She could direct her thoughts inward. But if she looked at the sign, she could not help but to resolve the lines into letters, the letters into words, and the words into a sentence. She couldn’t see green where the sign reflected blue. Not only was her conscious mind powerless to control her perception, it seemed irrelevant to her perception, as if it existed only to experience what it was given. She continued to walk. If my unconscious mind can do so much, what is my conscious mind for?

Your unconscious mind reads the sign. Perhaps it’s up to your conscious mind to decide if you will heed the warning.

“The only way to live meaningfully is to forge new connections. As much as we want what we had in our past, we can only experience the present. Rigley was a great dog. I loved him so much. But the only way I can experience the joy he and I shared is to bond with a new dog. New connections don’t erase the past. They allow us to appreciate it. I finally understand that.

Accepting that she didn’t have to forget Derrick was a turning point. She can carry it all with her, and she will be okay. Growing older is a process of accumulating the good and the bad.