The Copenhagen Interpretation
by C. E. Powell
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
Matthew has moved to the bed when Danny returns to the room. She digs out a pair of sweatpants and pulls a half-eaten sandwich out of the bag of snacks she’d packed that morning.
“You were gone a while,” says Matthew, watching her as she changes.
“I met some people by the pool,” Danny says, shrugging. “A couple of women from Portland.” She settles herself cross-legged on the faded bedspread and turns the TV on out of habit. He hums quietly beside her and curls up against the pillows.
On the screen, a man and a woman stand side by side on the deck of a ferry, the man’s arm around the woman’s shoulders. After a moment, they’re replaced by the Unsolved Mysteries title card, in its neon, late-eighties glory.
“Next,” says Robert Stack’s voice, from the tinny TV speakers, “the story of an innocent young couple whose romantic weekend was shattered” — a dramatic pause— “by a sadistic and elusive killer.”
“Really?” asks Matthew.
“You’re the one who likes having something on in the background,” says Danny. She opens her laptop and tries to focus on the work she’d promised to do while away.
“And you’re the one who gets distracted,” says Matthew. The couple on the ferry descends below deck, and the screen fills with a pair of high-school graduation portraits: a smiling girl with a pixie cut and a boy whose suit is too big for his shoulders.
“Is this the case the receptionist was talking about?” asks Matthew, as Robert Stack continues to narrate the facts of the case. “The couple who went missing on the ferry?”
Danny turns to look at him, at the haughty lines of his cheekbones and the gentle creases at the corners of his eyes. He looks tired. She doesn’t know if it’s just because she herself is tired.
“They didn’t go missing on the ferry,” she says. “They went missing on the way south.”
Matthew shrugs. “The end result’s the same.” He leans back against the headboard, hands behind his head and asks, “What would that be like?”
“Going missing?”
“Knowing someone who goes missing.”
“Honestly?” Danny says. “I think I’d rather know someone who died.”
“That’s awful,” says Matthew. He uncrosses his ankles and draws one knee up towards his chest until his hip pops. He doesn’t touch her, and she doesn’t try to touch him. It’s easier to pretend this way. “If they’re just missing, they might not be dead.”
“I didn’t say I’d rather someone died than went missing. I said I’d rather know someone who died.”
“How’s that any different?”
“I don’t like not knowing,” says Danny. “I wouldn’t know when to stop looking.” Her fingers have stopped moving on her laptop keys.
“Isn’t it better to have hope?” asks Matthew.
Danny doesn’t answer. On the screen, the couple on the ferry are deep in conversation, and it strikes Danny as horribly morbid, asking an actor to recreate the last words of someone’s life. Writing them down, printing them out, handing them over to a kid out of college who’ll take any role for money.
“Sorry,” Matthew says, after a moment. He sounds gentler now. “I know that’s a hard thing to think about now.” He pauses, and Danny can almost hear him swallow. “Just... you know. Ignore me.”
Danny turns back to her laptop and lets the hum of the TV fade into the background. She’s prepping to teach an introductory course on relativity and quantum physics in January, and the handout she’s halfway through writing up for a lecture is still open in her browser, waiting to be finished. An isolated quantum system does not possess fixed properties unless it is observed.
In high school, Danny liked physics because it seemed to be a way to get answers. It’s strange, now, to look at the trappings of her daily work and realize that so much of what she researches, so much of what she teaches, is the unknowability of things.
She types:
The location of an undetected subatomic particle can be described only by a function stating the probability that it exists in any given place at any given time. This function is called a wave function.
It’s strange, also, to realize that when she goes home, her life will simply unfreeze from its stasis. She’ll give lectures and hold office hours, she’ll walk across a campus bathed in light and breathe in the hot, dry scent of eucalyptus. Everything will be the same as it was.
On the TV, a group of actors are pretending to find the body of a girl in the wet ferns by the side of the road. The woman playing the body is lying so still that Danny almost believes she’s dead.
Danny types:
The moment that quantum particles interact with a macroscopic object, they cease to follow quantum laws and become part of the macroscopic realm. This is called wave function collapse.
“Lecture notes?” asks Matthew. He’s watching the show still, but his eyelids are drooping.
The boy’s mother is being interviewed now, her hair feathered around a face that’s frozen in the moment of loss, and Danny imagines getting a phone call. She imagines the fishhook of it slipping between her ribs.
Danny types:
Note that if two quantum particles are entangled, the quantum state of one particle cannot be described independently of the quantum state of the other.
“You need someone to practice on?” Matthew asks. “I like not knowing what you’re talking about.”
Danny shakes her head. “It’s just a handout,” she says. “Nothing to practice.”
Matthew nods, an odd expression on his face. Observing one particle will result in the wave function collapse of the system.
“Don’t work too hard,” he says, quietly. “You’re on vacation, remember?”
There was a time, Danny thinks, when he would’ve meant it as an invitation: an invitation to lie down beneath him, to let him slide her shirt off over her head and press her down into the mattress with his weight. But now, by the time Danny closes her laptop and calls it a night, Matthew has fallen asleep beside her, curled on his side with his hands tucked between his thighs, and Unsolved Mysteries has long since rolled over into late night news.
Danny changes into pyjamas and crawls under the covers, facing the wall of Matthew’s back. Matthew doesn’t snore anymore. It’s one of the oddities of this trip, the quiet that takes over at night, and Danny hates it. She can hear the clunking of the pipes in the bathroom, the soft call of an owl in the distance, and the silence grows heavier each time it’s broken.
She’s almost asleep when the sound of voices wakes her. It’s coming from the cabin next door, bouncing between the outer walls of the two buildings, and Danny opens her eyes to listen.
“I saw him yesterday,” says the first voice. “Didn’t you?”
“We didn’t see anyone yesterday,” says the second. “Just the receptionist and the woman at the pool.”
“We stopped for coffee up the road,” the first voice says. “I saw his car in the parking lot.”
“Zoe,” says the second voice, sounding tired, “you didn’t. It’s just because you were expecting to see him.”
“It was his car,” Zoe insists. “I know it was.”
“What was he doing, then?” says the second voice. It’s Ellie, Danny knows. It’s Ellie’s voice, and Zoe and Ellie’s cabin. “How could he possibly know where we are?”
“He might have figured it out somehow.” When Ellie starts to speak again, Zoe continues, more loudly. “Ellie, come on. It’s not impossible. You know that.”
“He isn’t following us,” Ellie says. “We would have noticed if someone was behind us all the way from Oregon.”
“Not if he did a good job following us, we wouldn’t.”
“Who do you think he is, some kind of criminal mastermind? You’re giving him too much credit.”
“And you’re not giving him enough!”
There’s a dull, muted slam — a hand on a table, maybe, or a bag on a bed — and then nothing. The owl from earlier gives a long, low hoot.
“I can hear you thinking,” Matthew says. His voice is soft, like he’s trying not to drown out the silence. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m not thinking,” Danny says. “I’m just curious.”
“Those are the girls you met at the pool,” Matthew says eventually. He doesn’t phrase it as a question. “You’re worried.”
Danny rolls over so they’re lying back-to-back, and Matthew sighs.
“Just listen to the owl,” he says, “and we’ll go find them in the morning.”
* * *
In the morning, just after sunrise, Danny stands in front of Zoe and Ellie’s cabin and finds that the windows are dark.
“Maybe they checked out already,” Matthew says, from beside her. “It’s not that early.”
“They didn’t say they were leaving early,” says Danny. She blows on her fingers to warm them up, shifts her weight from foot to foot. Her stomach is aching like it’s her sister who’s missing, like it’s her mother, like it’s Matthew. She feels the absence like there’s an absence to feel.
“You only talked to them for a few minutes,” Matthew points out, reasonably. “There’s no reason they’d tell you their plans.”
Why are you so hung up on this?, Danny wishes he’d say, and she wants him to call her out, to tell her she’s out of her mind for caring so much about two people she doesn’t know. She thinks about the face of the boy’s mother in the Unsolved Mysteries episode, stiff and immobile with grief, and she wants Matthew to tell her she’s different. That she hasn’t lost anyone who won’t come back in the end.
“Don’t do that,” says Matthew, gently. Danny realizes she’s climbed the steps to the entrance of the cabin, that she’s trying to open the door. “It’s not your room.”
“It’s locked anyway.” Danny lets herself be led to the car and ushered into the driver’s seat, but all she can think about is the windows, dead-eyed and blank behind the heavy, drawn curtains.
Danny drives them in silence the mile to the nearby café. She parks in the flat expanse of packed dirt outside, and Matthew follows her through the front door, a bell on its interior doorknob giving a sharp, metallic jingle when Danny pushes it open.
The café is a simple roadside coffee shop, faded wooden tables and a handwritten chalkboard menu hanging on the wall, and Danny’s halfway towards the glass case of sandwiches and muffins before she realizes that no one is speaking.
The barista is standing next to the espresso machine with a carton of milk in her hand; a couple sitting by the window are frozen in front of their half-eaten slices of coffee cake. A man with a newspaper is holding it open without appearing to read it. Danny follows the room’s collective gaze towards a television mounted near the ceiling in the corner.
“However, at around seven o’clock this morning,” says a somber newscaster, “the body of the missing hiker was discovered in Olympic National Park.”
The newscaster is standing in front of a cluster of trees, an ambulance visible in the background, and Danny remembers Zoe, the day before, talking about a backpacker who never made it to her campsite. The bottom of her stomach drops out.
“The whereabouts of Ms. Wainwright’s remains were brought to the attention of the local authorities by two young women, sisters and visitors to the Port Angeles area,” continues the newscaster. “The women report being taken from the parking lot outside their rental cabin at around two a.m. by an unknown man in a silver sedan, after which their wrists were bound, and they were driven to an isolated section of the forest. They were left momentarily unguarded in a clearing near Ms. Wainwright’s body and were able to flee along a deer trail towards the Eagle Ranger Station.”
Danny reaches instinctively for Matthew’s hand before realizing he’s still somewhere behind her. She turns and finds him motionless, his hands clasped behind his back and his eyes glued to the screen. To be sure no one can hear him, he leans down to speak into Danny’s ear. “Is that them?” he asks. “The girls you met by the pool?”
Danny nods minutely, swallowing around something tight and dry in her throat, as a small photograph of the missing backpacker appears in the upper corner of the screen. The backpacker is smiling, holding a walking stick in one hand and a water bottle in the other, and Danny assumes it’s from some other hike. Some other month. Some other life.
The newscaster is interviewing Ellie, but Danny can only hear part of it over the roaring in her ears. Zoe is staring into the camera, a shock blanket over her shoulders and her face smeared with dirt.
“We were lucky,” Ellie’s saying, in a hollow voice. “We were lucky he turned his back.”
The camera cuts back to the newscaster. “Authorities suspect the attacker to be responsible for several other unsolved disappearances in the Port Angeles area,” she says. “As of now, the attacker is still at large.”
“Oh my God,” says the barista. She shakes her head like she’s coming back to herself and turns to Danny and Matthew, a smile replacing the frown on her face like someone’s flipped a switch. “Sorry. What can I get you?”
Danny orders herself a bagel and a tea and waits while the barista bustles around behind the counter. Ellie and Zoe hadn’t checked out early, Danny understands. They hadn’t been sleeping or on a walk or getting breakfast. Something unbearable had happened to them, and Danny is not sure, in the wake of it, that she can talk herself down from all the things she’s afraid of.
The barista hands Danny her cup of tea, which almost burns her palms when she takes it, and she carries her breakfast to a table in the corner. She sits with her back to the room.
“Remember the man they were talking about last night?” Danny says, almost under her breath. She fiddles with the string of the teabag where it hangs down the side of her cup, and she’s not even sure she needs to speak for Matthew to understand her. “They said they knew him. That can’t have been the man who took them.”
“Unless they’re lying, and the man who took them wasn’t a stranger,” supplies Matthew at normal volume. No one looks up. “Or it might’ve just been a coincidence. More than one man can be awful at once.”
Danny takes a drink of her tea and burns her tongue immediately. “I know,” she says. “Trust me. I know.”
“Sorry,” Matthew says. “I should’ve... I’m sorry.”
The couple by the window has resumed eating their coffee cake, and Danny thinks about the couple on the ferry from the night before. What would’ve happened if someone on the boat had stopped them from going to shore with the person who killed them? What would’ve happened if someone had intercepted the killer’s van on the interstate, if someone had looked through its windows at a gas station and noticed the pale moon of a face in the back?
“It’s not your fault,” Matthew says, interrupting Danny’s thoughts. “They were just arguing. There’s no way to know what that means.”
“Isn’t there?” Danny asks. “What if I... I mean, what if I’d just...” She trails off. She doesn’t say: What if I’d gone outside when I heard them talking last night? What if I could’ve changed something?
And then: What if he’d taken me instead. She thinks about the backpacker’s family and realizes, jealously, that they have an answer to the question she thinks she might go her whole life without answering.
“It’s like the notes you were writing up last night,” says Matthew, eventually. “Nothing’s real until it’s observed.”
“I guess,” says Danny, “If by ‘nothing’ you mean ‘subatomic particles’ and ‘real’ you mean ‘follows the laws of classical physics.’”
“Close enough, though, right? You couldn’t have known until you saw them, just now.”
Danny thinks about it, and she’s sure, suddenly, that when she arrives at Matthew’s parent’s house in Victoria, nothing she finds there will be good.
“I worry about you a lot,” she says finally, watching a spider as it weaves its web along the corner of the window outside.
“You shouldn’t,” says Matthew. They both know he doesn’t mean it. “What’s there to worry about?”
“I don’t know,” Danny says. “That’s the problem, Matthew. The problem is that I don’t know.”
“What do you think, then?” asks Matthew. “What do you think might’ve happened?”
Over the years, Danny has been to Matthew’s parents’ house too many times to count. She’s woken to the newspaper landing damp and smudged on the porch in the mornings, gone slow and sleepy on summer nights and waited for the fireflies to brighten the sky. Now, as she imagines arriving there yet again, each possible answer to Matthew’s question collapses down into a single moment: the insistent wail of the siren, Matthew’s mother’s sobs, the exhausted slump of Matthew’s body as he sits on the ground in a shock blanket. Shock, Danny thinks, exists outside of the body and crushes with its weary weight.
“I think,” says Matthew, even though Danny has told him nothing out loud, “that might be too optimistic.”
* * *
Copyright © 2025 by C. E. Powell
