Quantum entanglement is not a metaphor. That’s the first thing people get wrong about it, and it’s the thing I needed to be wrong about for exactly as long as it took to write While You Are Over There.
Two particles, once paired, stay correlated no matter the distance between them — measure one, you instantly know the state of the other, and no one has ever fully explained why, which is either the most romantic unsolved problem in physics or proof that the universe has a sense of humor. I read about it in a magazine in a doctor’s waiting room, years before I had a marriage to put it inside of, and I remember thinking: that’s it. That’s the whole book.
Kirby and Jonah spin the entanglement conceit like a talking point, because that’s their job — they’re the show, the funded optimism, the water-cooler marriage performing itself for a species that needs its scientists to also be in love. Which is fucked, a little, if you think about how many real marriages have had to do the same unpaid performance, for an audience of one landlord, or one set of parents, or one God. But underneath the talking point is the actual claim of the story: you don’t have to be in the same room to still be the same experiment. That’s not comfort. That’s not even hope, exactly. It’s just what’s true, whether or not the two people involved can stand each other by the time the cameras stop rolling.
“While you are over there, I am yet still entangled.”
I gave that line to a scientist because a scientist could say it and mean it literally, which was the only way I could figure out how to say it myself.
This is the most loved story in the collection, by a wide margin, and I understand why: it’s the one where the metaphor and the marriage are doing the same work at the same time, instead of one standing guard over the other. Every other story in here picked a different kind of distance to survive. This one just admitted that distance was the whole marriage, and let two people be right about that and still love each other anyway.