A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [72]
By now I’m bellowing and honking like a besieged buffalo, and Kitty is running away, her tawny limbs no doubt dappled with light falling through the trees, though I’m too distressed even to look.
I think I’d have to call that the end of our lunch. I got twenty extra minutes, easy.
The end of lunch, yes, but the beginning of so much else: a presentation before the grand jury followed by my indictment for attempted rape, kidnapping and aggravated assault; my present incarceration (despite the heroic efforts of Atticus Levi to raise my $500,000 bail) and impending trial, which is to begin this month—on the very day, as luck would have it, that Kitty’s new movie, Whip-poor-will Falls, opens nationally.
Kitty sent me a letter in jail. “I apologize for whatever part I played in your emotional breakdown,” she wrote, “and also for stabing [sic] you.” There was a circle over each i and a smiley face at the end.
What did I tell you? Nice.
Of course, our little contretemps has been enormously helpful to Kitty. Front-page headlines, followed by a flurry of hand-wringing follow-up articles, editorials and op-ed pieces addressing an array of related topics: the “increasing vulnerability of celebrities” (The New York Times); the “violent inability of some men to cope with feelings of rejection” (USA Today); the imperative that magazine editors vet their freelance writers more thoroughly (The New Republic), and the lack of adequate daytime security in Central Park. 4 Kitty, the martyrish figurehead of this juggernaut, is already being touted as the Marilyn Monroe of her generation, and she isn’t even dead.
Her new movie looks to be a hit, whatever it’s about.
1. I’ve engaged in a bit of sophistry, here, suggesting that entangled particles can explain anything when, to date, they themselves have not been satisfactorily explained. Entangled particles are subatomic “twins”: photons created by splitting a single photon in half with a crystal, which still react identically to stimuli applied to only one of them, even when separated from each other by many miles.
How, puzzled physicists ask, can one particle possibly “know” what is happening to the other? How, when the people occupying tables nearest to Kitty Jackson inevitably recognize her, do people outside the line of vision of Kitty Jackson, who could not conceivably have had the experience of seeing Kitty Jackson, recognize her simultaneously?
Theoretical explanations:
(1) The particles are communicating.
Impossible, because they would have to do so at a speed faster than the speed of light, thus violating relativity theory. In other words, in order for an awareness of Kitty’s presence to sweep the restaurant simultaneously, the diners at tables nearest to her would have to convey, through words or gestures, the fact of her presence to diners farther away who cannot see her—all at a speed faster than the speed of light. And that is impossible.
(2) The two photons are responding to “local” factors engendered by their former status as a single photon. (This was Einstein’s explanation for the phenomenon of entangled particles, which he termed “spooky action at a distance.”)
Nope. Because we’ve already established that they’re not responding to each other; they’re all responding simultaneously to Kitty Jackson, whom only a small fraction of them can actually