Whispers & Wavelengths

Very childish, written after a failed Physics test to get a hold of my nerves. Enjoy if you can, tear apart if you don't.

The crackle never left her head.

It echoed, like the vast halls of her mother’s observatory, the fabric of space and time crumpling into one. She could hear, even then, the cosmos sobbing for the first time. Still in infancy, yet already with a perpetually expanding future ahead of it, blindingly bright and endlessly dark. Translations of wavelengths, temperature fluctuations, microwave backgrounds from long ago in the past. The echoes of the Big Bang.

Her mother used to lay Planck’s head down on her lap, letting the girl of less than nine listen to the recorded audio of echoes. It was Planck’s lullaby. Supposedly, it was the first sound she ever heard. “Your mother used to play crackles and booms on the stereo, while she had you. Music nowadays reminds me of it, really—rhythm-less, without note, hollow.” Her father once said, after her mother passed. “But she wanted it to be your power anthem. There’s nothing more powerful than the beginning, she said.”

Her father called it ‘the Whispers of God.’ He was never one to miss out on a religious analogy, even if he and her mother clashed regarding the sciences. Planck remembered all the Sundays where her father scolded her mother for not paying attention to the church sermon, preferring the comfort of a notebook and a set of formulas. “They’re numbers, Natasha,” he said, nearly tossing the book into the bin. “There’s no meaning in them, no god higher than the one we already have.”

Her mother would only ever give him a look, and he’d always give it back, for whatever reason. She’d return to her calculations the next Sunday, and they’d repeat the process a second time, Planck watching a few steps away.

Planck’s father only wanted to be devout. She never figured out how a blue-collar Catholic married an atheistic astronomer, but Planck knew that, at the very least, her father wanted to bring some sort of paradise to both of them. He would pray for Planck every dinner after her mother died, presenting himself as a holy man, pleading for his daughter to grow up a holy woman. But Planck mistook God for the sigma symbol, and the Devil as the thing you get when you divide something by zero. The holiest she’d ever be was when she listened to her mothers’ stereo cassettes. Listening to whispers from a distant deity.

She miscalculated. That was the only explanation she could’ve taken, from being with Quin. She must’ve been distracted by her eyes, as intimate as her fathers’ cathedral, as impossible as her mothers’ casket. Quin was too loud, too big a variable for Planck to calculate. That was it. That was the only viable explanation for the crackling in her head, growing louder and more deafening than ever before.

The crackle was the beginning.

It was the crackle that made Quin ask. It was Planck’s fault for wearing those earphones at school, pretending she wasn’t hearing anything when she was listening to everything. “What are you listening to?” the girl with paradoxical eyes and defiant blue hair asked, and like the idiot Planck was, she answered:

“Nothing interesting.”

Liar. She was a liar, and a phony too. The public eye had no say in what was interesting and what wasn’t not when it thought the shenanigans of overly decorated celebrities deserved more light than the creation of the universe. Useless.

But Quin, that wonder of genetics, that remainder in the division, that unruly transcendental number, she didn’t falter. “You kid,” she pressed on, “and in any case, you’ll be surprised what I find interesting.”

Planck memorized the fingers—supple fingers, periwinkle nail polish—nearing her ears, pulling an earphone out. Quin stuck it to her left ear, and for a moment Planck had something else to ponder over besides the essence of stars. For what seemed like the first time, Planck couldn’t hear the universe, preferring the shallow solace of Quin’s silence.

And it was the beginning of something great. She recognized it from a mile away, because at that moment, Quin looked at her and asked: “The echoes of the Big Bang?”

“Yes. How did you--” she paused. “How did you know?”

Quin grinned. “I know enough,” she extended a hand. “It’s Aquinas. Most people call me Quin.”

Her fingers left prints at the back of Planck’s mind. From then on, her schooldays were arranged according to the other girl’s bohemian lifestyle—Mondays, she missed out on English to drink beer. Tuesdays, she skipped the last periods of school to drive in Quin’s pickup. Thursdays were geography classes spent loitering on Main Street with a pack of cigarettes. Friday was the mattress spread across Quin’s basement, incandescent lights swinging above their heads. Wednesdays was science day, a day packed with STEM lessons and the moans of befuddled children. Planck never missed out on Wednesdays. Not even for Quin.

Quin herself never cared for the calculations, only the approximations. On a Tuesday after school, when Quin had driven them out to some far highway, she picked up Planck’s physics notebook. Planck studied the smile on her lips, the fingers rifling through graphite-littered pages, the cracked beakers in her eyes.

“This is the formula for speed, right?” she asked, pointing at V=x/t, ignoring the tan alpha equation below it.

“It’s velocity,” Planck replied.

“Yeah,” Quin laughed, “Same thing.”

“They are not. Velocity is a vector, and speed--”

“Don’t be such a geek, Planck,” Quin butted in. She stared off into the distant desert, the sun setting against dust storms and cacti. “It goes fast. That’s all that matters.”

And Planck shook her head, leaning against Quin’s shoulder. “You know, if the old masters thought the way you did,” she said, “You probably wouldn’t have a car to drive in.”

Quin stared at Planck, before draping an arm over her shoulders. “Well then,” she said, “You’re lucky they don’t think like me, yes?”

Planck chuckled. “You make it all seem so simple.”

“You make it all seem so hard.”

And perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps it wasn’t as hard as Planck was made to believe. She pulled out her mothers’ old cassette from her backpack, sliding it into Quin’s car radio. They sat there, languidly discussing the beginning of time, whispers and wavelengths crackling in the background.

Quin liked to drive fast. She couldn’t record her velocity for her life, but her pickup had enough horse power to make the numbers meaningless. “Slow down, slow down,” Planck once screamed, while Quin was ripping through the highway, ignoring the stop signs that passed them by, “You’re going to get us crashed.”

“How fast can I go?”

“What?”

“Look, dork,” she yelled, her blue hair clinging to her forehead, “If the kinetic frictional coefficient of car tire on asphalt is 0,67 and the road is dry and flat, how fast can I go before my brakes won’t be able to stop me in ten seconds?”

Planck turned to her, eyes wide with both speed and surprise. “How do you know about coefficients--”

“Asphalt isn’t as smooth as marble,” she laughed, “It’s only logical to think that there’s a unit for something as simple as roughness. You lot think of everything.”

Planck turned to the girl, stuck between chuckling and letting her jaw drop. She went through the numbers in her head, and glanced at the dashboard. “You can go faster,” she said, before turning to Quin again. “If your brake pad coefficient is 0.35.”

Quin nodded. “Tell me when I need to stop.”

They drove.

“Faster.”

And they drove.

“A little faster.”

And they drove, Planck’s brown hair breathing against the wind, Quin driving them into infinity. The radio crackled, still, fighting to beat the wind howling through the open windows. But Planck didn’t need to listen anymore. She had her own beginning, now, a beginning louder than anything the Big Bang could’ve made. “Quin.” she whispered.

Quin cackled, whistling to her speed meter. “Yeah, dweeb?"

And as they drove, something changed in Quin’s expression. The wind peeled away the devil-may-care attitude, drawing a genuine smile, a gaze free of all hint of irony. Planck watched, slowly, as the indefinable shrunk slightly, showing something that almost resembled humanity. “Quin,” the words weighed heavy on Planck’s lips, her brown hair slipping past her ears. “I love you.”

They stopped.

The deceleration was too fast. Too abrupt to balance out the forces. The diagrams were there in her head, all drawn out on the x-axis, the wind resistance and the time and the acceleration and the distance to the tree—

And they stopped.

She miscalculated. She must’ve miscalculated.

It crackled. The diagrams vanished, and the only force in her head was the one she felt as she slammed against her seat belt, and the thud of Quin’s head against the steering wheel.

Planck couldn’t scream. Planck couldn’t hear anything but the crackle of the cosmos—the whispers of a god that put her there, in the appropriate angle to be staring at eyes. Impossible, intimate, reddened eyes.