Atlas and Alice, Issue 19
Michael Sasso
Charlotte’s Quantum Ride On a summer day in 1989, Charlotte bafflingly avoids certain death and slices through the solid block of Time. The six-year-old is given a narrow glimpse of things immutable and true, present and ever-existing: No matter how you fool yourself into looking to the alleged past or the so-called future, she sees events that are, which is, who am. On that day, she sees that which will, to her, one day be, but which always is and is and is. Charlotte lives in a big house with a Jacuzzi and a bathroom no one ever uses. It’s on two acres of property that abuts vast New England woods to the south and an even larger estate to the north. Her kindergarten classmates are all the same pinkish color, and she never asks for a toy that she doesn’t eventually get. Poor people, hungry people, people in serious pain: they all happened sometime before she was around, when the world was black-and-white and there were no remote controls. It’s impressive, her insulation from most of humanity. She rides her bike, bright green and black with white handlebar streamers, up and down the quarter-mile driveway. Charlotte’s ten-year-old brother, somewhere near, kicks a soccer ball. Sunshine makes both the metal of the bicycle and the dark hair that falls to her shoulders hot to the touch. A breeze stirs the trees’ billion leaves and makes them sigh. In spite of her insulation, despite of the fact that it’s the kind of day that could make the most jaded soul forget about death, her heart is not light, her mind is not zen. But why? How can it be? The nervous heart is impossible to avoid, when you consider her family. Take, for example, that when juice is spilled on the Persian rug, the world has gone to hell. Her straight-A brother’s first (and only) B+ is worthy of furrowed brows and panicked investigation. The invisible angst that her father brings home every day silently exhausts him. Whatever it is that vexes him, Charlotte feels its relentless, scaly pulse. The grownups’ worries may be material, having to do with new money or the burden of the American Dream, but for Charlotte, her disquiet is more elusive. It’s just that the walls 53
