The Electron's Spin


Since the day she'd appeared in his class, legs crossed and blue eyes penetrating, the Greek alphabet could not help but walk drunkenly across the blackboard as he wrote, no doubt as spellbound as he.

Every semester he stood in some random room that looked like every other room in the building, preaching the laws of physics to dull-eyed collegiate neophytes, issuing them the commandment to go forth and integrate. His purpose on this earth, he felt, was to fill their cloudy heads with the wonders of the physical world.

But not her. She stared at him from her front row desk with eyes that hinted at some sort of secret knowledge he didn't have, something that the base animal in him was clawing to get at. Something told him that she didn't need to be here, that she didn't just know physics, but commanded it. He was sure that where she walked, electrons forgot their spin.

Two weeks into the semester she'd come to his office. She needed some clarification on the frictional force, she'd said. With arms brushing and eyes locking, she sat beside him as he scrambled through books, equations spilling over the desk as he tried desperately to look at something other than her face. It was a face, he thought distantly, that couldn't be described as beautiful, and yet he'd never been held so willingly captive by any before hers.

As the days wore on, he dove into the lectures like a madman, trying to forget that she was there in front of him every day. But of course, he couldn't. The lectures went on. Planetary motion. Kepler's laws. Nuclear fireballs that burned trillions of miles away. It was these that must have provoked her. These wonders of the universe that made her stop him under the dark shadow of the building as he left for home one evening after class.

Come with me, she'd said to him. Come with me and I will show you.

Light from a nearby street lamp trickled into her blue eyes as her voice, a voice like melted chocolate, held him there while her words caressed his face and kissed his lips and ran invisible fingers over illegal parts of him. He'd had no strength of will to say no.

Legs tried to buckle under him. His was the life of an electron, where deviation from the norm was not allowed. He had his orbit; she, hers. There were rules that were not meant to be broken. But she could break them, he knew. He knew that she commanded the stars.

And that was why he'd found himself here, on the chilled plateau of a nearby mountain, standing near the glistening dome that housed a looking glass to the stars. But they would not be going in. Her telescope required no machinery.

The cloudless sky afforded them a view to eternity, the Milky Way arcing lazily across the black ocean of night as the deafening silence of the mountain top enfolded them in its arms. As he stood in awe of the sight, she leaned her head back and threw her arms out with a tinkling laugh, almost as if to embrace the universe. He swallowed in nervousness and wonder. He opened his mouth to speak but before the words could come she placed a finger on his icy lips. I will show you, she said. And then she stepped away from him.

Under the full moonlight she removed the burden of her clothing, letting the moon caress her bare skin with pale, hungry fingers, relishing its desire for her. The light seemed to him to drip from her body in a thousand shimmering rivers.

There is a god, he thought. And it is you.

Somehow his own clothes found their way to a nearby bush as she stood silently in front of him, running fingernails lightly over his skin. He felt like every star in the night sky was watching.

They eased themselves to the ground, their bodies fusing together in mimicry of the nuclear force. She was the E to his mc 2. Lips melted with lips and skin with skin. As her lips grazed his neck, his chest, his stomach, he swore that he could feel electrons shifting in their orbits, not caring anymore if they obeyed the rules of the universe. She altered the laws of quantum mechanics itself.

Theories slipped out of his mind as she moved to lay above him, her hips locking with his. He looked up to see stars fighting each other to be her halo, moonlight begging to be her blanket. He reveled in the disorder and the chaos as his body merged completely with hers. And in the final moments of it all, when he felt his body take the leap into the unknown, he saw it all -- quarks to galaxies, atoms to universes. He knew at that moment that everything he'd learned, everything he'd been teaching, was only a thin layer of dry dust hiding the rich, fertile earth beneath. She showed him the rules and the laws and then shattered them with a gentle shudder of her hips and the small cries of ecstasy. The stars seemed to fall like rain onto their bodies and he worshipped it. And her.

And when she kissed him with a smile under the moonlight, he realized that, for a while, an electron can ignore its spin.


© 1998 Adhara Law