Page 114 of Jagged

"Can I show you something?"

She nodded, swinging around to stand in front of me. "Of course."

I dug in my pocket to pull out the envelope given to me by Kanika at the gallery. "My piece from Tatiana's show sold."

"I am not surprised at all. You're very talented," she said, as straight faced as ever.

"Thanks…"

"What's the paper?" She tapped the edge of it when I held it between us.

"The check. I haven't looked."

"Why not?" Astonishment lifted her brows.

"I'm not sure…"

"People sometimes say that reading something on paper or seeing numbers in a row make things feel more real. Perhaps that's part of your hesitation." Clem gave my hands a squeeze, her gaze still on the sights around me for a moment before falling on me. Sometimes I truly appreciated her matter-of-fact delivery.

"Maybe…"

"Right now, you are Schrödinger."

"I'm a what now?" I gawked at her. "Is that like some kind of dummy?"

"No. It's like the thought experiment in physics." She spoke faster than usual which made it a little bit more difficult to follow. "It's the idea in quantum physics that particles can be in two states at one time until they're observed. A paradox of sorts."

"A whatty-what-what now—"

"If you put a cat, a vial of poison, and radioactive material in a sealed box. If the radioactivity escalates to break the poison, it should kill the cat, but until you open the box, you can't really know if the cat is alive or dead. So essentially, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time until an observer looks in the box." Again, a matter-of-fact notion that I did not understand one iota of information coming from her mouth.

"So the envelope is both alive and dead?"

"Not quite." She turned her index finger in the area. "With the envelope closed, your career as an artist is both simultaneously non-existent and existent. Until you observe it, it is both."

"Well…" I thought about it. "I guess I feel kind of torn like that."

"Exactly. When will your reality collapse into one possibility or another?"

"Huh?" I stared…just stared.

"When are you going to open it?" She bounced on her toes again once, and smiled. "I can do it. I can't hardly wait."

I laughed. "Maybe you should collapse my reality then."

"Okay, give it to me." She grinned and snatched it from my hands.

My amusement soared, and all the anxiety of it seemed suddenly ridiculous. "Go for it."

She wore the most mischievous smile while carefully peeling open the envelope. The extraction of the check followed. She looked up at me and said, "I have collapsed reality."

"You have. Am I alive or dead?"

"Oh, I think you will agree you are very much alive." She turned the check around to show me, and, my eyes widened.

"Well…" I gulped. "Guess I can afford the down payment and Tati can afford the house."

"Yep." She snickered and set everything down on the table beside me. "You know, money doesn't make an artist, right? You were an artist way before you observed this check."

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