Michelle Bitting: SCHRÖDINGER’S SISTER • Cleaver Magazine

Nonfiction by Michelle Bitting
SCHRÖDINGER’S SISTER

You could say I am a thought experiment. Sometimes described as a paradox of quantum superposition or divide in perception. To be considered both dead and alive. Simultaneously. No one I’m close to, privy to my little life’s events doesn’t know what I’m talking about. The harrowing tragic in multiples. Sensations of standing on rickety bridges with planks rapidly disintegrating. Who says if I’m living or dead? Maybe fate should be observed, could be figured down to results, the subatomic core. The answer found on a balmy night in June of ’63 on the westside of Los Angeles. Back bedroom of a small stucco abode rented from the church up the street. My brother asleep in his crib and our parents in love enough to ring the electron heat of their young adult bodies, my father planting his seed in the well of my fertile mother. As far as I can tell, ever since, I’m still here. As for my brothers— the one in the crib and the younger who sprang eleven years after, well, they are not. One family and two suicides make for a stunning rupture in space, in continuity, though I’d never been more alert, more awake than when I got the first call. Concerning the brother from the crib scene earlier. I was a newlywed eating chili fries in the food court of the giant L.A. mall on La Cienega Boulevard. From a pay phone in a corporate-bland hall near the restrooms I talked to a sheriff. Cell phones were not a thing yet. Stunned, I went numb despite my beloved hovering, holding me, my shoulders, something no one could do or had done with my brother and his frayed mental state for too long when he decided to latch his dog behind a baby gate in the kitchen, two large bowls of water and kibble left filled to the rim. So that no concerned creature might interfere in his solitary business. The pills and plastic grocery bag (his condemned person’s hood) ready in another room. The bed where he lay down to breathe one last time, his paintings arranged around him as if for a gallery viewing. Suicide is a strange business, to state the gross obvious. Statistically not unusual but you can imagine me in the mall and my confusion. The sheriff’s grave words: What is your relation to the deceased? Your father’s here. He wants to talk to you. How it was then that I fell into a void that was also like being lifeless and living at the same time. Or suspended. Unwillingly. Thrust into a dark, airless crate of cosmic proportion. A vacuum of the unspoken, of silent cries and pleas for help. The infinity of what ifs we’d dwell upon after. Forever. My mind a new panoply of superpositions. What just happened? When did it start happening? At what point in my brother’s brain was it about to happen but had not yet? His skull a suicide’s vault of secrets. His smile the last time I saw him really a lock on his mouth that had already swallowed its key. What I know for certain: once upon a time there was a moment it was about to happen but hadn’t. Yet. Then it did. A bridge collapsed. Somebody fell. I was left on the other side. Twice. Because my younger brother, twenty-five years later, also. My thought experiment is not the same as the famous one delivered by Schrödinger in 1935. And it’s entirely possible my great-grandmother drank wine and ate schnitzel with Einstein circa 1935 at a salon in a beachy canyon of Santa Monica, since named Rustic. The precise year Einstein and Schrödinger first discussed a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source boxed with a Geiger counter—there to detect decaying carbon atoms—signaling a shattered flask, poison released, an expired cat. Released from its aliveness, that is. In Copenhagen, some say at a certain point the feline is both breathing and deceased. Simultaneously. No conclusion possible until the casket opens. Reality contingent upon humans, their observations, in other words. When, again, twenty-five years after the first brother threw in the corporeal towel, my younger followed suit, the suicide kind—firearms and booze in his childhood room on Boxing Day—my glass shattered, the poison released. Though I, unlike my brothers, have oddly not died. And the question of positions, multiple in this mortal moment lives on. Their bodies do not. The predicament no longer exists as to when and if to collapse. Two brothers and the bottom of a ravine. One sister, split like a rope, a heart, an atom, a bridge. Your mind and mine. The unretrievable endlessness below. Schrödinger’s sister standing in stereo on either side of a cliff with a black box in her hands that somehow continues to purr and glow the longer she looks at it.

Michelle Bitting was short-listed for the 2024 Cleaver Magazine “Duality” Creative Non-Fiction Award and has been commissioned by the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department for her original poem “Twyla” as a finalist in the Paris/Olympiad cultural exchange this September 2024. She was short-listed for the 2023 CRAFT Character Sketch Challenge, the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, and named a finalist for the 2021 Coniston Prize and 2020 Reed Magazine Edwin Markham Prize. She is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in July 2024 by C & R Press. Recent poetry appears on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, Catamaran, SWWIM, Terrain, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Michelle is writing a novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.