Flatland

When Meg and Cal and Charles Wallace "Tesser" through space, they accidentally find themselves in a two dimensional universe. Their three spatial dimensions can’t survive in this universe and they nearly die, constrained like paper dolls on a flat surface.

We live in three spatial dimensions – and one dimension of time: a four-dimensional universe. Behind us, the past stretches out immutably, and before us lie the infinite probabilities of future time.  When I met Sjors, my time dimension became irresistibly tangled with his. Where he went, I would be. We would talk and live and breathe together and make love. We would have children, adventures, and I would touch him and know him every morning and every night. When we turned 85, we would step from the universe hand in hand. He promised me his future and I promised him mine only as a formality: it was already his. 

When I lost Sjors, I lost my future. For more than a year, I have lived in this flatland: having only this moment. Constrained to one single point in time. Like Charles Wallace, I have not been able to move or breathe and I’ve felt it killing me. I knew that the pain of living in an insufficient universe would become too great, and I would step out early. My future time was hopelessly slim.

In the past two days, I have glimpsed the elusive fourth dimension. 

I spent the weekend in Suffolk.  Jim invited me out to his home in a converted barn. Not a romantic getaway: a working weekend. Jim only needs to sleep four hours each night and I tried to keep up with his frenetic pace. Saturday, we worked for fifteen hours and Sunday, seventeen. We had pots of coffee and fridge-fulls of diet coke, and an occasional walk through the freshly cut barley fields: golden yellow to offset the black-green silhouettes of trees and the pale sky.  

We worked on my physical chemistry concept, resurrecting the stalled-out project one conversation at a time: mapping our ideas onto complementary computer screens on opposite ends of the same desk. He pushed and prodded me – drew out my ideas, brushed off the dust, dressed them with his insights and handed them back gleaming. Excited, I would work again until my back ached and my feet twitched. We ate our meals twice in a small seaside town, and walked onto the pebble beach to see the grey water reflecting the mood of a gloomy sky.  Late at night, to revive bloodflow, I propped my legs on the desk and kept working. It was painful and long. I lost track of time, of myself. He put chocolate in front of me and I made us sandwiches. Jim fed the fish. I wandered out into the dark, pacing the gravel along the edges of his porch light.

He said, “With the power and value of this tool, we can influence how pharmaceutical companies do business. We sell them polymorphs of their drugs in exchange for donations to humanitarian causes and drugs to third-world places.”

“Benevolent blackmail,” I christened it. I’d had a similar idea: “We offer discounts to pharmaceutical research into lifesaving drugs – vice lifestyle drugs.”

“You can do more with this than what you’re planning,” he said. “What if…”

And so it went. And, just like that, I had some future again. And it wasn’t linked to the pain of knowing Sjors won’t be in it. It wasn’t a reminder of the children I would not have. It was just: a hopeful future that was all mine. For a few hours this weekend, Jim handed me a compass and map.

There may be a way to leave Flatland.