Conservation of Momentum
The visit, as they say, was nothing to write home about. Collin put me up for two nights in a pretty standard hotel. I went to work with him and we compared notes. I talked about the opera house and he showed me around town and took me to see a few projects he had done - an art museum with a theater integrated into it, a recording studio, and a particularly problematic modern music room in a house they had fixed for someone who was a classical pianist with tastes that trended towards the clean and simple.
After two days of educational work with Dotta’s friend Collin I got back on the train, this time alone, and let the velocity carry me home. I had bought a book and a few magazines at the station’s bookstore to help me pass the time on the train but I didn’t pull them out at all. Each time I tried to read the words seemed stale. They didn’t line up in sensible sentences, and the paragraphs held no concepts. My mind spun, more than it had the past two days, and if I paid close attention to the movement of the train, the steadiness of my hands on the armrest, the rushing green scenery outside my window, I could hear and feel and see and even smell Hel spinning in its courses. If I had an appetite to eat and decided to eat I am sure that I could have tasted it, too. All of the sudden I could see how this place worked, how we could exist here for an eternity, income cards, free housing, jobs if we wanted them, and suddenly the whole idea of life after life, that this sort of blind living was our inheritance from here on out, from the moment we crashed into this realm, seemed absurd.
The train raced on. I tried to sleep and failed, watching the sun fade and the stars rise up over the blackness of the night and then come up in a roar of pink and orange. And beneath my feet Hel danced in concert with the entire universe, the momentum of the spinning top holding it aloft.
Somewhere in the middle of that night I came to the conclusion that life on earth was nothing more than a prologue for eternity.
***
“She’s back!” Alex smiled widely at me as I walked into the opera house. The plasterers had gone and the only thing that remained to be done before the opera house opened in two weeks was to get the plastic sheeting off the floor and seats. It was going to be left on for just a little longer, until some crew came and did a comprehensive clean of the place. Then, we started a week of rehearsals with the tech crew before dress rehearsals and then finally opening night. Alex had finished every single read that needed to be done and I came back with a few idea tweaks from Collin, jotted down in my notebook.
“Hey, yep! I’m back!” I was so happy to see him and the project we had been working on. I wanted to sink back into the pleasures of life in my neighborhood, put myself to work, and just enjoy all of the amazing things that I could do. I waved my notebook at him and yelled across the lobby, “I have ideas for you!”
Alex crossed towards me and we went out to the small cafe next door. We grabbed two cups of coffee and seated ourselves after a short chit chat with the barista, who we knew so well. In fact, I think anyone who had ever worked on the opera house knew this cafe well and the kind people behind the counter knew us pretty well, too.
I opened the notebook up and spread it out before him, open to the page of calculations and measurements Collin and I had done together.
“Why am I not surprised, Autumn, that when you told me you wanted a little break it was really just to go do work things. This is great data and some fantastic ideas, particularly for some of the smaller spaces and the lobby! I knew that there would be some sort of resonance, or maybe I should say dissonance, from any large crowd but the idea of hiding the acoustical buffers in the spaces below the staircases is genius! We worked so hard on the conservation of momentum in the cylindrical coordinates of the theater that the lobby seemed like an afterthought.”
Alex was being generous with his speech and the stunning equations Collin had helped me with. Nothing about the opera house was an after thought but Collin had calculated things correctly just from my description without ever having seen the space.
He continued, “I was hoping we could kind of ignore it, treat it as the minor problem it is, but these solutions are perfect. How did you hear about this guy? We should totally have invited him down!”
“A friend of a friend knew him and said he’d be up for a visit. He didn’t seem to want to come down when I talked about it - he was working on a private piano room for someone who brought forward all these magnificent concertos. I wonder who they’re by and I wonder if anyone else knows them. I’m interested to figure it out because he couldn’t remember the names, just where his fingers went. Collin did a fantastic job with it and we talked a little bit about how he handled all the concrete and glass this guy required.”
“Let me guess, he wanted a super modern room?”
“Yep.”
“I’ve worked on a few of those before.”
“Haven’t we all?”
We finished up our coffee and strode out of the cafe and back into the theater, and the days picked up as they had before I had met Loki.