Victoria Sees It by Carrie Jenkins (love letters to the dead TXT) 📕

She was flying back to London the next day. I couldn’t drive her to the airport, but I wanted to ride with her in the taxi. In the back seat, we held hands.

“I hope you have a safe flight home,” I said. I felt an unfamiliar heat in my chest, one that didn’t hurt.

She looked back at me with serious eyes. “I promise,” she said.

As if anyone can promise that.

—

After she’d gone, I felt dizzy and my head hurt really badly. I realized I was carrying a weight in the pit of my stomach, a melancholy nostalgia for the version of me who only existed with The Cop, was only able to exist because of her. I’d caught a brief glimpse of that me, and it was like seeing a ghost. All the possible future selves you didn’t become, you have to carry them around inside of you while they slowly turn grey and die.

I wanted to stand at the edge of an ocean and think. Puget Sound was the best I could get. It was easy enough to take a cab from the airport to Alki Beach, which was more or less on my way home. I go there sometimes. Whenever I get to the beach, though, my heart sinks a little when I remember dogs aren’t allowed. Nothing makes me smile for real these days except cats and dogs. When humans pass me in the street or in a park and I’m smiling because I just saw a dog, they sometimes smile back. They’re making a mistake. I am never smiling at them. It’s not like it was in the hospital, not anymore. Smiling at people no longer keeps them away so I no longer do it.

There aren’t real waves there, either. Not breakers. Just a rhythmic slithering in and out of white foam, a tangle of albino snakes’ heads writhing up into the sand then changing their minds all at once and wiggling back out. They reminded me of the snakey worm diagrams Humberton was fond of drawing on the blackboard, when he would talk about how objects exist as little lines through spacetime. I’d heard Alki Beach itself was a fake, but I wasn’t sure what that could mean. As I walked, a gentle, misty rain settled down on the beach like a cloud. I slipped a hand into the tote on my shoulder and pulled out my umbrella. I always carry an umbrella. I pay no attention to what the weather looks like when I’m leaving the house. If you know Seattle then you know what I mean.

An umbrella wouldn’t do much to keep this kind of omnipresent rain from soaking into my clothes, into my skin, but I didn’t care. The weather quickly emptied the beach of other people, which helped. I spent some time moving slowly across the grey sand, through the grey air, in my grey bubble. Thinking of nothing, feeling nothing. A blank grey space. I don’t know how long I was out there. Look out of this window, Watson. See how the figures loom up, are dimly seen, and then blend once more into the cloud-bank. The thief or the murderer could roam London on such a day as the tiger does the jungle, unseen until he pounces, and then evident only to his victim.

Was The Cop straight now? So what if she was? What did that even mean? Even the path of light does not define straightness. Light bounces back on itself, bends when things get weighty enough, even breaks down, falls apart, comes to pieces. Just like us. Light is all that’s really there, when I look in the mirror and I am afraid.

Remember this: Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all? Well, go on then, who is it? The fairest one is the most beautiful one. The fairest one is the palest one. Right there, there it is: the pale-skinned are the most beautiful. This is fine, because we made fairness stand for “justice” as well. It is the opposite of refraction: we compress. A rainbow of meanings, of values, made to toe a single line of white light. Isaac Newton said light travels in a much subtiler Medium than Air. He called it the Luminiferous Aether. There is a subtlety to language too, the way it moves, refracts, reflects, bends with the gravity of situations. Follows power. Language moves faster than we can imagine, is most full of colour when we find it colourless. It needs an even subtiler Aether to move in, a purer air, an atmosphere for beings finer than ourselves. Aether is another one of Nyx’s children.

Lemon taught me that Newton wrote his Opticks in the vernacular. In English. As in, not Latin. A radical democratization of knowledge, Lemon said. Well, maybe. But one born in the belly of British colonialism, a hungry thing eating cultures and shitting out a new language of science. The language. The definite article. Beating the specific refractions of English into prescription lenses for all the world’s knowers to wear. On my driver’s licence, it says under “Restrictions”: CORRECTIVE LENSES. What’s so corrective about certain distortions of light and not others? Too much clarity is a disaster of its own kind. I guess I could wear the glasses, but I prefer to stay off the road.

Anyway, my point is that Newton’s Opticks made popular the idea of an experimentum crucis. A crucial experiment. Before that, crucial didn’t mean at all what it means now. It was pressed into service as a bit of scientific jargon. It comes from crux, the Latin for cross, because the experimentum crucis is a cross-shaped signpost that will appear at a fork in the road. So crucial is just another metaphor, like most of science. (In case you’re thinking about it, don’t give me some kind of scientific objectivity spiel here. Unless you can give it to me in