The Antiparticle Delivery Driver
content warning: suicide
He used to see his daughter, Maya, each Saturday. Her mother would drive her to his condo early in the morning, and he would have to be awake because the doorbell never woke him. He slept deeply then, knowing nothing of particle decelerators or antimatter. In those first few years, Maya would come bundled in her fuchsia parka or carrying her crocheted blanket or her enormous Ratatouille 2 pillow. Maya’s mother never dropped her off without an extra layer of insulation, as though being around him might contaminate her.
In later years it was the French that separated them. “Quoi? Quoi? Non, Papa!” Maya insisted she had to immerse herself in the language because one day she was getting the fuck out of the Midwest and moving to France, where James Baldwin had been happy. The antiparticle delivery driver hadn’t read much James Baldwin but had once been a Black man at a large university and feared Maya was speeding into a black hole. Of course he could express none of this to her. Even to him, it sounded like paranoia.
Now, on Saturdays, he drives experimental antiparticle specimens from one lab facility to another. He doesn’t like to think about antimatter, the inverse and negation of everything. How could such destructive stuff be the key to cancer treatment, to interstellar travel? He nods and frowns at scientists who see endless potential in what he thinks is surely a recipe for annihilation.
Meanwhile Maya stews at her mother’s house, on leave from college. The antiparticle delivery driver thinks his nonintervention was part of the problem, or all of it. The night Maya tried to hang herself from the ceiling fan in her childhood bedroom, her mother wouldn’t let him in the ambulance. “Get in your enormous fucking science fiction truck and floor it,” she said. “Or leave Maya alone. You’re good at that.”
But he didn’t think he was good at it, and still doesn’t. When Maya told him she was studying philosophy and wanted to wear blue linen sheath dresses on PBS talk shows, he told her to get in the car, and he drove her past the boarded-up club where he used to be a bouncer, past the mattress store where he had tailed customers at twenty-foot distances for two straight years, and to the parking lot of the low-rise call center where he’d been fired for yelling at a grandmother who refused to see the difference between her SIM card and her LTE chip on the same day he had been told to clear out of his home, out of his daughter’s life.
“You’d better be ready to fight,” he told Maya, knowing she had no idea why they were idling in an empty parking lot and starting to think he had no idea either. “You can be a glamorous light in the world, but the world isn’t light or glamorous. It will try to swallow you.”
“It isn’t the twenty-twenties anymore,” she said, and in his memory now he sees that Ratatouille 2 pillow on her lap, buoying her, though that couldn’t be right, since Maya must have been thirteen. He didn’t begrudge her her growing optimism, but something in him wanted to burn it all off her, make her know that nothing was certain, nothing was safe.
He keeps having trouble with his memory. Objects, like the pillow, keep popping up in the wrong places. Now he sees stabilized antiproton vial #153 standing upright in its tray in the decelerator room instead of slinking, stolen, between two oil rags in his backpack. He remembers the positron canister as empty, the way it’s supposed to be when he clocks out and drives the delivery truck home. He sees Maya rigging herself to her ceiling fan, though the text she sent twenty minutes ago was not trancelike, as on that other Saturday, but blunt and loopy, the way her mother used to be when she swallowed too many pills.
He’s heard the scientists: If the big bang had ended with antimatter on top, the world would be full of anti-houses, anti-streets, anti-ceiling fans. Each atom on earth would hold its negatively charged particles safe in its center, with positively charged particles zipping around the nucleus. Every atom would relate to every other atom through positive charges, not negative ones. When you shocked yourself shaking your neighbor’s hand, they might laugh and say, “Static positivity again!” And sure enough, little streams of positrons would be jumping all over the earth all day and dashing up to the clouds as lightning at night. But that isn’t how the world is, that’s only how it could have been.
“Nothing has to fall apart,” he told Maya before she left college, before she even went to college. But things were already falling apart. Maya had spent a week in Paris with her high school French class, and she’d called her father halfway through the trip to say France was full of tired people and false accomplishments, and she was embarrassed she had expected to find some other world. She returned to the States resolving to grow closer to her father but found him newly employed at a research facility that needed him on Saturdays.
“You know,” Maya said, swirling her cereal spoon, “Antiparticles were theorized before they were discovered. Paul Dirac put Einstein and Schrödinger together and worked out mathematically that antimatter had to exist.”
“It had to exist,” he repeated. “What a conclusion.”
“What a conclusion,” she agreed, and three weeks later, she was in the emergency room.
Now, she’s either at her mother’s house, maybe making a sandwich or watching TV, or he’s a moment too late, and she’s nowhere in this universe at all. But the antiparticle delivery driver, her father, is on his way with the positron canister and the antiproton vial, which, if opened close enough together and at the same time, may or may not release, for Maya, an astonishing amount of light.
Rachel Girty is a poet, writer, and opera singer based in Chicago. Her work has appeared in Sinister Wisdom, Pretty Owl Poetry, The Briar Cliff Review, Body Parts Magazine, Perfume River Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the Bain-Swiggett Poetry Prize at the University of Michigan, where she earned her MFA.