CJ Foot

I was working in the lab late one night, when my eyes beheld an eerie light. The light was bright, but it didn’t hurt to look at it. I sat mesmerized, my movements slowed, suspended almost, by the light. The light grew stronger, until I couldn’t look at it and had to look the other way. I felt like I was inside a light so strong that it wasn’t a light at all, it was more like a shrinking room closing in on me from all directions while I sat overwhelmed and astonished. I felt an impatience growing in me. It was uncomfortable. When a light threatens to grow around me with such debilitation, I tend to look the other way toward a wall. I find comfort in watching my own shadow loom over me, controlled by the light, growing thick and thin, long and short. It’s comforting to be in the presence of something larger than myself, and to believe in it. At bottom some belief in a kind of Pope! I looked the other way at the wall. There was no shadow. Oh my. There was no wall. It was only I that was controlled by the light. The impatience continued growing in me, approaching, I would say, restlessness. I think I had always been a restless child, always coming from something or going somewhere, my body a spasm of directions. I grew up next to thousands of brothers who looked exactly like me and who were equally restless. Our living situation was gossip fodder to local physicists, who pinned us like common flies to be examined by naturalists under the microscope. They said my brothers and I were indistinguishable. They drew up hypotheses and principles to map out our otherwise savage and inscrutable trajectories. The hypotheses confirm one another. Often they repeat each other. The truth is, I must say, unique. Must I say that? Did I say that? The light bounced off me, sapping my energy, and I grew cold. Finally, in the distance, I made out two radiant shapes coming toward me. The light made them blurry at the edges. They came closer and closer and became more and more, yes, yes, luminous in their shiny silver outlines. I took a deep breath. I closed my eyes. I felt the shapes so close to me I could reach out and touch them if I wanted to. I didn’t touch them, I didn’t want to, and yet the two radiant shapes were standing there, in front of me, behind me, surrounding me and talking above my head. I recognized from the timbres of their voices that they were my brothers: the voices of my brothers who I believed for so long had turned their backs to me. One of them said to the other, It’s you. Just look at that. It’s you. And just what are you doing here? The other could have said, I was copying scraps of song lyrics and poetry. He could have said, I was coming from something and about to go somewhere. He could have said, Our mother was always somewhere high above with a magnifying glass, burning her beautiful boys like ants. Instead, he said: I was working in the lab late tonight and then my eyes beheld an eerie light. I looked the other way. I tried to find my shadow, but there was no shadow, because behind me there was no wall. Behind me there was only the mirror. The mirror doubled the light back on itself, creating intricate tribal patterns around me as the two lights struggled and lapsed into each other. The light bounced off me, scattering my energy. I grew cold. I struggled to slog through this lattice of light as the incoming light again and again shoved me in one direction and its reflection kicked me toward the opposite. My movements slowed, and slowed, and I felt that I was being immobilized by this tessellation of bright patterns. All while the impatience growing in me was approaching complete and unspeakable hopelessness and I began to feel like Sisyphus as I slogged through this matrix of interference which kept on knocking me this way and that. All the while I kept on growing colder and colder. I think I had always been a hopeless child, easily excited, my mind an impressionable English plane tree. I remember having thousands of brothers who were equally hopeless and who looked exactly like me. I remember growing up next to them, not with them. This was common knowledge to local physicists, who had turned our estrangement into what they called an exclusion principle. They had proved it, to their satisfaction, by all manner of logic. It made me petty and prescribed, their logic. Self-conscious—superstitious, even. I never took up the same space as my brothers, that much is true. There was no room in the room for my brothers, who had long turned their backs to me, long before any physicist decided that mutual rivalry was now a principle. I could not bear it. It really was so cold. I needed to get out. I needed stamina. It would take a lot to achieve escape velocity. Finally, in the distance, I made out two radiant shapes coming toward me, which, when they were standing less than a few feet in front of me, I recognized as my brothers. The cold huddled us. I took a deep breath. I opened my eyes. There was no one there. I grew colder. I remembered another principle, something about a cup of tea losing heat as the steam carries energy away. I’m growing colder, I said in my mind, ultracold. I sank lower in my chair. I remembered in my mind there was a tree. They felled the tree in my mind and from the pulp of its bark made the leaves of a book which they said contains all the truths about me. The book was on the table of the lab late one night when my eyes beheld an eerie light: it is Atomic Physics by CJ Foot.

Lê Đức Trọng (b. Vietnam) is a Physics PhD student at Georgia Tech. His poetry has been published by Verses from the Underground, Sextet Lit, Sardine Can Collective (now Fish Girl Collective), and others.