Schrӧdinger Can’t Save My Grandmother

I’m supposed to let my grandmother out of her cube today. She’s been in there for ten months alone. I’m not sure what I’ll find when I open the door. Her environmental conditions suggest she could be alive, but that doesn’t mean she is.

I didn’t know my paternal grandmother well before the event. I can’t say that I know her better now, although it feels like I do. Sitting beside a cube of alloy day after day for months, I’ve spent a lot of time exploring my grandmother’s home. It was the best way to entertain myself as the cube hummed in the center of her living room like a mechanical grist of bees. It’s not like I could talk to her through those carefully fabricated walls that kept her safe.

The photo albums are what I have gone over the most with smiling visages of an era before I was born. I’ve discovered through them that my grandmother is full-blooded, bold, and occasionally dramatic. I’ve seen a lot of photographs, but one sums all of this up. Her, standing behind my father as a little boy, arms crossed but smiling like a vagabond as she trips my late grandfather with a stockinged toe. I think that we could be friends if she comes out.

I’m supposed to let my grandmother out of her cube today, but there’s been reports that give me pause. Not everyone is still breathing when the door to the cube is opened.

Some people, and possibly my grandmother, haven’t survived.

#

Months ago, a week after the event, I was with my father as he drove us to get supplies for my grandmother’s cube. People drove differently during those initial days, erratic like blind mosquitoes and prone to biting as well, at least in the figurative sense. It was the stress that provoked it, the physical and literal kind. Everyone felt like they had the weight of the world on the shoulders. Some of us felt it more than the rest.

“They refuse to identify who owned the drill that did it,” my father said, “but they disturbed the plates, so now there is more mass near the surface. Too much for things to be normal.”

“But what does that mean for us?” I asked.

“It’s going to be harder to breathe for a while,” he told me, “and your grandmother is going to live in a box.”

“To reduce gravity?”

“To reduce its effects,” my father corrected. “She’s lucky, you know. Not everyone of her age has lasted this long.”

“Why not?” I watched as the second sedan in our three-block drive ran a red light.

My father slowed down to let the reckless vehicles pass and said, “Their hearts gave out.”

#

They were harvesting materials to build more ships to take us to space. An age of new frontiers and seemingly endless opportunities collapsed by a single drill. No one expected our desire for the skies to ground us even more. I was scheduled to be on one of the first flights in a new line of ships; instead I’ve spent the last ten months here. The patch I’ve plucked bare on the right arm of my grandmother’s sofa, a desert in a field of green threads, reflects how many times I’ve counted the stars as I’ve sat in her living room. There are scabs around my nails, fissures that don’t extend deep enough to convey how hopeless I’ve felt.

As I said, I don’t know my grandmother well, but judging by what I’ve learned from my days next to her cube, I don’t think she would approve of me being cooped up. A photo of her, perm and high heels like steeples, lingers in my mind, an idol that keeps me alive. She is young and on a rooftop somewhere in the city looking out at the lights, while everyone is clustered in conversation behind her. When I first saw the photo, I thought she was a Tibetan raven, black dressed and intensely staring at the world with glossy eyes. My grandmother wasn’t meant to be locked in a cube. She would not have agreed to trap me beside her. I’m sure of it.

My father was supposed to be the one sitting here, and he was for a time, but one day he showed up at my apartment and I knew what he was going to say. His doctor’s appointment hadn’t gone well. He needed to get into a cube like my grandmother or he wouldn’t survive. Ever since then, my mother has lived with his cube down the road.

After that, I was the only one left that could reasonably do the job of monitoring the environmental conditions of my grandmother’s cube. That being said, I could have refused. I didn’t, of course, because it didn’t seem like an option. What kind of person would I have been if I walked away?

I wonder about the answer to that question a lot nowadays, as if I’m a greenfield plot of land that will never know my full potential.

To be honest, I don’t know when I started caring about whether my grandmother was alive or dead. Before the cube, I visited her twice a year and we barely talked except for brief iterations of how I was progressing in Philosophy of Religion or how I still didn’t like whole milk in my coffee, conversations that were mostly to appease my father. If she had died back then, I worried if I would be able to conjure enough tears to not disappoint him, but time seems to flow differently beside the cube. It’s like honey through a sieve, slow and intentional. Sometimes, I think I’ve been sitting here forever, captive with my grandmother, the stranger that I know well. It’s very important that I meet this woman today, finally.

Then again, there’s the matter of “a fundamental flaw in the foundation.” That’s the sentence they’ve used to explain why so many have died in the cubes. A collapsed plate no larger than my fingernail that sometimes falls into the matrix of graphene and destroys the delicate system. With that, the effects of gravity are no different than living outside.

There’s no way to know if this has happened to my grandmother’s cube, because the environmental conditions only monitor temperature and quality of air. I’m supposed to report alarming changes to the company that produced them, but I’ve never had to in the ten months I’ve been here. When I’m feeling optimistic, I take this as a sign that my grandmother might be okay in there.

Are you excited?

I read the text from my mother and sigh. She’s been planning for this day since month six and has invited everyone on her street over for a barbecue that begins in an hour. I’m not going; I don’t need to see the faces of the cube people and their keepers bent in measured joy. When I let my grandmother out, I am leaving. My plan is to ask her to come along, because I think she would want that, a clipped raven that once stood on the rooftop of the city looking untouchable. I bet she’s like me and has dreamed in her cube about flying. Scratch that. I know that’s what she’s dreamed.

Sure, I’m excited, I text my mother back. Grandmother is the best.

I touch the side of the cube, feeling the vibrations under my palm like small drums. My grandmother is waiting for me to open the door, and she is alive. I am certain of it.

My phone pings as my mother replies, and my watch beeps simultaneously. It is almost time.

#

The birds were loud outside the window that afternoon. I remember that clearly. They shrieked from the ground, vile and tormented as their wings flapped like they carried the universe on them. None of them could become airborne anymore with the increase in gravity.

“I won’t do it,” my grandmother told my father. “You’re not putting me in one of those tombs.”

“It’s the only way,” he said, “and it’s temporary. You’ll have food and books, whatever you need until then.”

“But I won’t be able to talk to you? To anyone?”

“No,” my father said. “The walls are too thick. Nothing can pass through.”

“I’m not going in,” my grandmother folded her arms. “You can’t make me do it.”

My father sat down next to my grandmother. I remained standing, peering out her window.

I’ve thought about this moment often since my grandmother entered her cube. When it happened, I was annoyed with her for being difficult in an already trying situation. I wanted to get home, so I could finish contacting my friends that I hadn’t heard from, the ones that were close to the eruption zones. It’s not like my grandmother was travelling the world before the event. There were gray stains on her sofa from the dye of her pant legs rubbing off like polluted ghosts. What would change for her if she had to lie around doing crosswords in a smaller room?

My father whispered with my grandmother in words I couldn’t hear, and I glanced over. Whatever he said made her eyes shiny, two lakes on her parched skin that overflowed as I observed. There were no more conversations about what my grandmother was going to do following this interaction. I think back to it, trying to recall the words that I missed, yet they are too quiet for me to decipher. All I hear are the birds.

#

The best, huh? Never heard you say that about her before, my mother’s text says.

And?So what? I type back.

Nothing, she writes. Just surprising. Your father and her never got along.

I can tell who my grandmother is without your help, I reply.

My mother starts typing, then stops.

It’s one minute until noon, the hour when my grandmother is scheduled to come out. Everyone in this neighborhood is opening their cubes at the same time in grand affair, and the local news is filming in a handful of homes. I wonder if they’re worried about what they will find inside, or if they’re hoping for tragedy. That’s the most viewed video online at the moment: an elderly woman lying on the floor of her cube lifelessly as her daughter weeps into her shoulder.

My hand trembles on the latch of the door as I wait for my watch to beep indicating it’s midday. Why does my mother have to be cynical? To doubt my grandmother? I look at the stack of photo albums on the sofa leaning in a precarious manner, a waffle tower stacked too high.

How I know my grandmother after these months is beyond the photos though; I can see her in the subtle yellows and brave blues that frolic on her curtains. They match her sofa, but the paintings on her walls clash, abrasive and modern. She selected them for their content, because they mean something to her. My grandmother is a woman of intense emotion blending into a life that she thought was appropriate for her time. The paintings she chose are her taloned scratches on the walls that have contained her. So she didn’t get along with my father? That could mean a million things. My grandmother is good. She is a bird wanting to soar, and she has done her best.

I think about that afternoon again, the one where my grandmother agreed to live for months in this cramped box. I cannot guess what it was that my father said to convince her to get inside. Her expression was tearful, lost like a ripple in rapids, and I always assumed it was because she was frightened of what was to come. Now I’m not sure. It could have been guilt or shame. Some unsavory memory of disappointing my father. I don’t know what that look on my grandmother’s face meant. It’s not in any of her photos, yet that’s the problem with photographs. You throw the bad ones out.

My watch beeps.

I grip firmly on the handle of the door but do not pull down, even though I’m supposed to let my grandmother out of her cube. I’ve been by her side for ten months, captive and anticipating this moment, yet I don’t know what I’ll find when it’s open. A part of me thinks it better to keep the door closed. At least then I can imagine her as a hard-driving bird like me grasping at the metal of her cage in fury, instead of a woman firmly stuck on the earth. It would be easiest to keep the door shut, pretending that I know the truth like that Schrӧdinger guy did with his cat. Then my grandmother would never have to be gone.

But if I don’t open the door, all I will have are my predictions, my guesses of what could be inside for the rest of my life. It’s not how I want to live; I don’t want to be anchored to anything, especially questions of what may or may not be. Besides, I still hope that one day I’ll travel on a ship through space counting planets instead of stars, and when I do, I want to truly be free without regrets, without doubts.

So I open the door.

My grandmother stands there, alive and smiling at me.

I hold my breath as I wait to see what kind of person she will be.