Fundamental Interactions

February is for love letters (NSFW)

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Each February Ultracold features an essay in the style of a love letter and this year I chose to finish a draft that I started while attending

Raechel Anne Jolie

’s workshop Elemental Openings in March last year. The workshop was focused on writing sex, which is something I never do, and I returned to it throughout the past month because everything started to feel so bleak that I needed a reminder that fun, and bodies, and all combinations of the two, still exist. The original prompt back in March was to write with the four elements in mind, but my physics training got the best of me and I ended up writing within the frame of a different foursome.

FUNDAMENTAL INTERACTIONS*

Beneath all of its ripples, ridges and dimples, there are only four forces that tug on the fabric of physical reality.

Gravity is the most promiscuous of the four, or maybe the most generous, as it creates an attraction between any two bodies that have mass.

The electromagnetic force takes credit for the little sparks and shocks from brushing up against another body. A space filled with electromagnetism is also one where you can be seen, illuminated and made warm.

The other two forces, which physicists call weak and strong, are responsible for all the smallest pieces of your body being able to cling onto all other tiny bits of you. They help you stay together even when you feel like you are coming apart, like an internal heat is cleaving your atoms into something hot and burning, like an internal fire may make you melt. Sorry, I just mean to say that we call these two forces nuclear.

I. ELECTROMAGNETIC

Consider, for instance, why a hand laid at the side of your face, at the back of your neck, or on the soft patch of your stomach just above the waist of your skinny jeans, never manages to fall through. Did scientists that discovered the forces that prevent your atoms from merging with those of another mourn that this is so? Have they considered that sometimes you want nothing more but to let a lover seep into you as if your skin was a layer of dirt and they are the only nourishment that can make you flower? Did it even occur to them that nature could be so cruel as to hardwire us to always stay separate? Or maybe they looked at each other with a wink and a smile and set an intention to find out just how rigorous this separation has to be.

When I touch you, the electrons in my hand feel the force of the electrons in your upper thigh and I am thinking about how often textbooks say that electrons don’t like each other and instantly I dislike these particles that you are nevertheless filled with. When you grab my hand and pull it up higher I am still annoyed - how can the electromagnetic force be so oblivious to how much I need for there to not be an edge where you end and I begin?

But I am also grateful. Were it not for tiny particles that carry this force, those smallest bundles of light that make your hair look golden, I could never see how you quiver when I find a way inside of you after all. You tilt your head slightly and they hit the edge of your jaw: the most microscopic form of cosmic impact play that simply makes you glow.

II. STRONG

To build a body you need quarks and electrons. You bind quarks into protons and neutrons then combine them with electrons and hope that they will stay to make an atom. Luckily, when quarks find each other they really commit - most of the mass of protons and neutrons is not accounted for by stuff but rather the sheer intensity of the strong force which keeps quarks together. A connection so strong that it becomes massive, so intense that it takes up space. Doesn’t that sound good?

Of course, the joke writes itself because quarks come in flavors and two of them are “top” and “bottom.” The top quark and the bottom quark never actually pair up, but we all know that even physicists can be wrong.

And I am not advocating for binaries and I am not advocating for replicating harmful heteronormative dynamics. But sometimes I get on my knees and my whole field of vision fills up with your body and if you run your fingers through my hair I have to put all of my trust in the strong force or otherwise I would, when you call me “good,” instantly come subatomically undone.

You didn’t study physics like I did, but you know just how much strength is packed into my atoms, just how far you can take it. The strong force is a hundred trillion trillion trillion times stronger than the force of gravity which leaves for a lot of room to play, by which I mean a lot of room to whimper and beg.

The top quark is sometimes also called the “truth” quark. Nothing feels more true than the way I want to be bound to you.

III. WEAK

The first time you say you love me, you are sick and I probably shouldn’t be in your apartment. But I am here and you don’t want soup, or an extra blanket, or to watch your favorite YouTube videos. You want me to join you in the shower and once your face is thoroughly wet, you say that you may be desperately in love with me. You love water. You’re afraid of showing weakness. In your book, this is both. Later, I realize that you must have been terrified.

The world of physical objects would simply fall apart were it not for both the weak force and the strong one, but this is not a lesson that we manage to learn from the particles that constitute us. You are committed to strength. You feel strongly, you love strongly, you fuck strongly. “You’re getting so strong,” you say when I send selfies from the gym, but in your bedroom I am soft and supple. I bend under your hands, I whimper, I beg and pretend that I couldn’t just swat you away if I wanted to. You revel in the strength you gain from our negotiation, over and over and over again.

I know what happens when I go home, how much you work, how much you worry, how much you feel like it’s solely your job to carry the world into tomorrow, even if your back breaks underneath it. This is a kind of strength too, but when you walk me through your agenda or gripes about your partner I don’t see that delectable raw power in you. You seem tired and afraid, barely the person that wedged her knee between my legs to that one time we went dancing and I immediately understood that I’ll never actually want to resist you. I never tried. I found refuge in being weak for you.

The weak force participates in both fusion (merging) and fission (splitting). At our best, you bring me to the edge of dissolving into you, of adopting the pace with which your chest rises and falls as my internal clock, the sound of your breath as the only way I will ever know air. At our worst, I split in two, into a person who wants to care for you, and a person angry with how little you care for yourself. I want you to loosen your grip on the world without loosening your grip on me. You show me weakness one last time when you cry on my couch, two weeks before we break up. By the time we do, you’ve worked it all out, you have rehearsed your lines, you have regained your strength, you sit unmoved and golden in the bright summer sun.

I still think about your commitment to water. How you always mentioned the hotel pool when you travelled. How you corralled us all, all the lovers and friends of lovers and whatever exists in-between, to the beach in the summer. And whenever we were alone, you always wanted to be in the shower, covered in thin streams of water like they were the only threads worthy of covering your smooth, slight body. At one point you must have been a water nymph that was forced to shrink all her ancient magic into two pale pools of blue that are your eyes. At one point, the resolve flashing from beneath their surface was enough to ruin me.

IV. GRAVITY

There is no you, just the weight of your absence. It is early and I am underslept. My eyelids are heavy and my body is heavy and my arms hang heavily in my lap as I make myself small for the train bench. I can’t will myself to look at my phone or a book, or fix my gaze on the window where I could intermittently catch glimpses of the winter sky. What can the cool brightness of the morning offer me when I have the memory of your warmth? I hate the blinding overhead light so you are always getting out of bed to turn on the small bedside lamp instead, and it bathes you in shades of orange, like a sunset that simply could not let you go.

I know better than to fall asleep on the train, but even though my eyes remain open, spacetime warps around me like in a dream that is as dangerous as it is exhilarating. Physicists believe that the middle of each black hole, or each point of most extreme gravity, hides something so singularly intense that it breaks equations and language alike. At the moment, I don’t have either; all of my rational understanding has been supplanted by the beating of my heart.

Did you know that black holes are actually really hot? There’s all this stuff that accrues around them, a halo of warm matter that lingers right by the horizon that separates our material world and the black hole’s centre filled with mystery. I don’t know if the matter wants to fall in. Matter may not actually want anything, and the aftermath of its fall would be gruesome - objects of all sizes stretched to the point of breaking, a literal tearing apart. I am, however, not just matter but also flesh. I know how to crave rapture.

As the train pulls into the station, I open my eyes fully, shift in my seat and look up at the window. It’s dark, and we are underground. Disappointingly, when I stand up, my body resists your gravitational pull and I walk towards the office unimpeded.

EPILOGUE

The sex scene that has stuck with me most ever since I read it as a teenager comes from William Gibson’s Neuromancer, a cyberpunk classic which I read in a terrible, barely coherent Croatian translation the year before I moved to the United States. I remember when I read it because I tried to recount the plot to my mom as she drove me to an admissions interview for the American boarding school that ended up changing my life. Reading Gibson became formative and consequential for who I was at sixteen, and who I wanted to become. I read every one of his novels that I could get my hands on after I moved, scouring the shelves of the local Barnes and Noble in search of something like continuity of thought that would tie me to who I had been back home. When I let myself dream of cheating on physics with another profession I thought I may end up writing like Gibson, a sort of magical realism gone wrong because we had replaced genuine magic with modern technology. I didn’t, but I still often think about Neuromancer and Case, the hacker antihero, and Molly Millions, the cybernetically augmented mercenary assigned to guard him, fucking in a hotel room so small as to be described as a coffin. It is a brief passage, more clinical and technical than it is sexy:

She settled over the small of his back, kneeling on the temper foam, the leather jeans cool against his skin. Her fingers brushed his neck. "How come you're not at the Hilton?" She answered him by reaching back, between his thighs and gently encircling his scrotum with thumb and forefinger. She rocked there for a minute in the dark, erect above him, her other hand on his neck. The leather of her jeans creaked softly with the movement. Case shifted, feeling himself harden against the temper foam. His head throbbed, but the brittleness in his neck seemed to retreat. He raised himself on one elbow, rolled, sank back against the foam, pulling her down, licking her breasts, small hard nipples sliding wet across his cheek. He found the zip on the leather jeans and tugged it down. "It's okay," she said, "I can see." Sound of the jeans peeling down. She struggled beside him until she could kick them away. She threw a leg across him and he touched her face. Unexpected hardness of the implanted lenses. "Don't," she said, "fingerprints." Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it over her, his thumb along the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers spread across the labia. As she began to lower herself, the images came pulsing back, the faces, fragments of neon arriving and receding. She slid down around him and his back arched convulsively. She rode him that way, impaling herself, slipping down on him again and again, until they both had come, his orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where the faces were shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were strong and wet against his hips.

Within the novel, a classic heist executed by a heterogeneous band of outcasts in search of one last score set against an AI-laden dystopia run by large corporations, this style of writing makes sense. Case is a hacker who lost his ability to hack because an employer he had stolen from damaged his nervous system in retaliation. His wet dreams will always be rendered in digital, in neon, in blocks of code. Molly is a mercenary. She is practical. She can’t get smudges on the vision-enhancing lenses that have been grafted on top of her eyes just because she’s horny. Gibson writes her body, and the way she uses it, equally practically, with anatomically correct words, not unkindly but without tenderness.

I think I should have balked at this as a teen, that the swapping of rose-colored glasses for cybernetic implants should have alienated me. Instead, I was obsessed with her. Maybe I hated my body more back then so a cyborg was someone that was easy to look up to. Maybe I thought I was more cold and cool than the years ultimately proved me to be. Maybe I just imagined her to be as slickly androgynous as what I’d seen in the Matrix or Hackers, a quality that I have never been able to fully resist. Certainly, this was before a boyfriend ever made me feel bad for wearing short shorts or doing well on a physics exam. In the years when I wanted nothing more than to be a normal-yet-hot college girl, I let go of Molly. Years later, on the dating site where I met my husband I chose to go by Sally Shears, the alias of the same character in a different William Gibson novel. I had hoped it would be a good omen. Luckily, I was right.

There is no happy ending for Molly and Case in the novel, even after the heist goes well and even after the rogue AIs that were previously the story’s mysterious villains merge into what seems to be a benevolent superintelligence, a detail that feels like the most unrealistic fantasy from today’s standpoint. The relationship between the mercenary and the hacker is not a fantasy though, and it ends as matter-of-factly as it started. The story lingers on a handwritten note:

HEY ITS OKAY BUT ITS TAKING THE EDGE OFF MY GAME, I PAID THE BILL ALREADY. ITS THE WAY IM WlRED I GUESS, WATCH YOUR ASS OKAY? XXX MOLLY

But after just a few beats we are back to machinations in cyberspace, now without the mirror-eyed “razorgirl.”

Every time I’ve re-read the novel as an adult, it’s been this part that’s helped me make sense of why the sex scene made such a strong impression: it is so genuine to how each of them is wired. Gibson is not writing something ethereal and romantic, because that’s not who his characters are, because their sex is not a magic act that will grant them escape from the realities they carry within them, but rather reflects that interiority. This was the appeal of Molly’s character too, she was not cool because she was a “girl boss” or because she wore leather pants, it was because she knew what was at her core, and what made her tick. I have always wanted to be that kind of person, someone who derives their strength from unflinching self-knowledge, from knowing how to move through the world in accordance with who they are. Of course, there is also nothing hotter.

Best,

Karmela