Quantum Bargaining

Last week the IRS sent me the sort of letter that sends all the blood from your extremities to your vital organs in preparation for last-ditch survival.  Once I’d scraped myself off the wall, I marshalled my papers for the defense and then kept strenuously busy all weekend with hiking and housework.

On Monday I spent two miserable hours with a greyhound rescue enthusiast/tax advocate named Jean, at the end of which we determined that everything would almost certainly be fine.  “Fine” in this case meaning “the IRS somehow lost all the paperwork you stapled to the check they cashed, but they’re magnanimously willing to let you file it all over again without additional penalties.”

Throughout the course of this fateful meeting I tried to keep my heartbeat steady by gazing at the lanky hounds comfortably passed out on cushions on the floor, the broken legs from their racing days splinted and healing.  The thread of anxiety stretching back to the moment I had opened the letter tightened and thrummed to the tinny strains of the Nutcracker Suite.  They always put you on hold with the Nutcracker Suite at the IRS.  It must have focus-grouped as soothing to panicked taxpayers.

For a quavering minute I thought, This is really Too Much.  I can’t do this.  When do things get easy again?  When can I stop jolting through the rapids?

The greyhounds lay there like canine stickbugs, as comfortably melted into sleep as such a pile of angles can get. They did not seem to be sick of the Nutcracker Suite.  I gazed at the calendar (more greyhounds) hanging above a stockade of black binders.  I practiced taking measured breaths.  I tried to let this scary moment in my life be just okay.  And all at once, with a little sideways slip of perspective, I was contemplating the moment through a funny science fiction window I’ve come to call Quantum Bargaining.

No doubt you’ve heard “bargaining” described as one of the five stages of grief.  Ever since Val’s diagnosis a year ago I’ve looped through those stages (and several more of my own devising), circling the board and landing again and again on those five familiar squares.  I haven’t spent much time on “bargaining,” though.  A couple grim desert island fantasies early on — “What if I had to pick between Tuley’s life and Val’s?” and the like — but I always jumped off the island right away with relief that I didn’t really get to flip that coin.  For a month or so I did find myself savagely swapping out irritating strangers for the woman I love — Stupid tailgater!  How come he doesn’t have cancer?!  Give him Val’s and leave us alone! — but that’s more likely the unholy child of Anger and Denial than an actual impulse toward Bargaining.

But one day my grief and hope and anger rooted around in the magpie’s nest of my mind and came up with an oddly satisfying old trick of mine.  It’s a shift of perspective rooted in quantum mechanics, of all things.  Or at least the bits of pop physics I absorbed in an adolescence spent reading lots of speculative fiction.  Evidently a lot of weird stuff happens in quantum physics that simply can’t be explained by the laws previously proposed.  And at some point in the 60’s someone came up with a crazy, simple notion that made sense of a lot of the apparent physics paradoxes, and it was this: There must be other universes.

The idea is that every time a universe is faced with some options (which is constantly, endlessly); every teeny time (or maybe just every significant time) there is a chance to go one way OR another… the universe fractures, and new universes go forward from every one of those different options.  Say I eat a mango instead of a banana from the fruit bowl: at that moment my universe fractures into (at least) two new universes, one where I eat the mango and another where I choose the banana instead.  And then the twin universes go on their merry ways, identical until the fruit decision point and then fracturing into multiverses at every tiny decision point thereafter.  Or so I understand it.

So here’s the Quantum Bargaining hybrid my magical-thinking brain came up with.  Say I’m experiencing something extremely unpleasant, like for example a heart-stopping encounter with the IRS that could wreck what’s left of my savings.  I fervently wish it weren’t happening.  I feel panicky and unkindly oppressed.  But occasionally I’ll think: You know – if this is what’s happening, a lot of other options are therefore not happening.  And then I think, I’d rather be writhing through this terrifying tax moment than quite a few other things, even if my savings wind up gutted; and anyway, I’d absolutely offer up all my savings for Val’s good health.

There are actually several bargaining options here, come to think of it.

A    The Forward-Looking Bargain, as in “If I take this one on the chin, Universe, then you have to promise that Val will be well, okay?”;

B)   The Play Fair Bargain, as in “Dang it, Universe, haven’t you given us a crazy enough year? We’ve already served our time.  Leave me alone already.”

But: I don’t believe the universe is out to get me. And I also don’t believe I can make pacts with the future.  Rather inconsistently, though, what my brain proposes is C) the Quantum Bargain, which goes backward in time like this:

Maybe this particular unpleasantness is happening because, in a previous universe, I successfully made a swap! Somehow, in an earlier universe that spawned my own, I was actually offered a desert-island bargain.  Something like, Pick one: excellent results for Val’s next CT scan OR smooth sailing with your taxes.  Can’t have both.  Well, of course my previous, parallel self picked Healthy Val with a Side of Tax Torment.  And the universe split, and here I am, momentarily miserable but (and this is comforting) in the service of my own personal well-being.

The moral and scientific logic here is inconsistent, I know.  (For one example, Quantum Bargaining only consoles from the perspective of my own universe; I have to trust that all other universes can take care of themselves.)  And I don’t actually believe it. It’s more of a thought-experiment that calms my racing heart and makes me laugh to myself. But perhaps this is how an agnostic approaches the numinous. And for a moment, right in the panicky middle of unpleasant times, there is something wonderfully comforting in the thought that my earlier self is taking care of me; and that somehow this scary moment could actually be part of the juju helping Val to be well.