Love and Other Thought Experiments

by Sophie Ward

Genres: Marriage & Divorce; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Rachel and Eliza are hoping to have a baby. The couple spend many happy evenings together planning for the future.

One night Rachel wakes up screaming and tells Eliza that an ant has crawled into her eye and is stuck there. She knows it sounds mad—but she also knows it's true. As a scientist, Eliza won't take Rachel's fear seriously, and they have a bitter fight. Suddenly their entire relationship is called into question.

Told in 10 interconnecting but self-contained chapters—each from a different character's perspective—and inspired by some of the best known thought experiments in philosophy, particularly philosophy of mind, Love and Other Thought Experiments is a story of love lost and found across the universe.

Release date: September 28, 2021

Publisher: Vintage

Print pages: 272

Sample

Rachel picked up the magazine that Eliza had left in the kitchen. The cover was a drawing of a tree with the roots embedded in a man’s head and above him a blowsy crown of leafed branches arched towards the sun. It wasn’t a typical image for Eliza’s reading matter. Rachel turned the page.
‘Thought experiments are devices of the imagination used to investigate the nature of things.’
That’s a lot, thought Rachel. But she liked the sound of it. It tickled her to think of stories being used by scientists. I could be a thought experiment, something Eliza has dreamed up to challenge her hardened reasoning.
‘If I were a thought experiment,’ Rachel asked Eliza as they got into bed that night, ‘What one would I be?’
‘I’m not sure you can be a thought experiment,’ Eliza said. ‘They are supposed to help you think about a problem.’
‘If you can imagine it, then it is possible.’
‘That is one theory.’
‘So,’ Rachel pushed away the book Eliza had picked up and blinked at her girlfriend. ‘Imagine me.’
Eliza smiled and shook her head. ‘This is what happens when the fanciful encounter the factual.’
‘I’m not sure which is which here. Quit stalling.’ Rachel prodded Eliza’s armpit.
‘Fine! You want to be a thought experiment? You can be a zombie! No, no, I’ve got it. You would be, yes, Hume’s Missing Shade of Blue. The colour he has never seen but can still visualise. Happy?’
Hume’s Missing Shade of Blue, thought Rachel as she laid her head on the pillow. Yes. I can be that. ‘Tell me some more.’

1.
An Ant

Pascal’s Wager
The seventeenth-century mathematician Blaise Pascal argued that since God either does or does not exist and we must all make a decision about the existence of God, we are all bound to take part in the wager. You can commit your life to God because you stand to gain infinite happiness (in the infinite hereafter) with what amounts to a finite stake (your mortal life). If you do not commit your life to God you may be staking your finite life for infinite unhappiness in Hell. By this logic, the infinite amount of possible gain far outweighs the finite loss.
But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite.
Blaise Pascal Pensées 272

 ‘The ants have moved in here now.’ Rachel brushed the small body aside and turned the pillow over.
Eliza glanced up from her book.
‘The ants. In the sitting room. They’ve followed us in here,’ Rachel said.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I just saw one.’
‘No, are you sure it’s an ant? They’re so tiny, I don’t know how you could tell.’ Eliza returned to the hardback that was balanced on her bosom.
‘I don’t need glasses.’
‘Yet.’
Rachel prodded her. ‘Do ants bite?’
‘I’ve got to finish this for tomorrow.’
‘It’s definitely ants. The same ones that were on the sofa last summer. They got in through the gap in the window and now they’ve found a way in here. You couldn’t put a baby in a room with ants. Eliza?’
‘Yes?’
‘Did you see them before? When you slept on this side?’
‘No.’
‘You wouldn’t have noticed anyway.’
‘Maybe one.’
’Is that why we swapped sides?’
The book fell away from Eliza’s hand. ‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘No. Tell me. You think I moved you to that side of the bed because it’s infested?’
‘It’s okay. Read.’ Rachel looked at her girlfriend. ‘I know. Sorry.’
Eliza didn’t go back to her reading but she kept the light on while Rachel fell asleep. She wondered whether she should get the pest controller from down the road to look at the flat. Mr Kargin. He had a second job repairing and selling old televisions. They had walked into his workshop one day, to buy an aerial for Rachel’s black-and-white set. The man spent a long time looking through cardboard boxes and muttering about outdated equipment.
Eliza saw Rachel trying not to mind the posters on the wall, each one with a picture of a cockroach or a rat, along with a method of extermination. There were so many different creatures and all the pictures were the same size so the termites were as big as the squirrels. Mr Kargin stared at them both for some time.
‘He stared at me,’ Rachel said when they walked away from the shop. ‘He was fine with you.’
He didn’t find an aerial and he was bad tempered about the entire transaction though it had been his idea to start rummaging through the boxes. Eliza didn’t imagine he made much money in television repairs but she thought the extermination business might be a means of expression as much as an extra income. She had promised Rachel they would never go back.
Rachel lay next to her, breathing heavily. It had been Eliza’s idea to change places because she had a new desk and it wouldn’t fit in the alcove on her side of the bed. It was a practical decision and even Rachel could see that it made sense. The flat was already crowded with furniture and the desk could double as a bedside table, but maybe the desk had disturbed a nest or maybe it was the time of year for ants to move indoors. Eliza had not deliberately changed sides because of the insects but now she would have to prove that she cared enough to fix the problem. Ever since they had talked about having a baby, Rachel had been testing the temperature of Eliza’s love.
Eliza wondered how many of her decisions were basically points of honour. Throughout her life, her job at the university, the bicycles and vegetarianism, even her haircut seemed as if they were chosen in reaction to the opinions of an invisible audience. She had become the sort of person she approved of but she wasn’t sure she had chosen anything she actually wanted. She checked the pillow one last time and turned off the bedside light. She would sort out the ants in the morning.
 
program

The next day, Eliza cycled past the television repair shop on the way to work. Smaller versions of the vermin posters were stuck inside the display window below precarious stacks of broken televisions. She thought of all the chemicals that the bad-tempered Mr Kargin would use in their flat. He seemed to radiate poison. Even ants didn’t deserve a murderer like that.
They had talked about the ants over breakfast and Eliza had googled ‘getting rid of ants’.
‘All these ants look regular-sized. I can’t find any photos of extra small ants.’
Rachel didn’t want to read about eggs and nests.
‘I don’t mind one ant. But not in our bed, and not hundreds of them. I keep thinking of that song . . . “just what makes that little old ant . . . “‘
‘Peppermint oil.’ Eliza twisted round from the screen to watch Rachel singing while she stacked the dishwasher. ‘It says here they don’t like peppermint oil. Well, that’s easy. I’ll get some later.’ She closed the page and went back to her emails.
‘I like the idea of the peppermint oil but I can’t see how it will stop the ants in the long term . . .” Rachel wiped down the kitchen surfaces and went to stand by Eliza’s chair. She rested a damp hand on Eliza’s shoulder. ‘They’re very tiny but even if they got the oil on their feet or paws or whatever ants have at the end of their legs, it’s not going to hurt them.’
‘They don’t like the smell.’
‘So much for “High Hopes”.’
Helloworld;
Eliza arrived home with a small vial of peppermint oil from the chemist.
‘It seemed awful to get it from the supermarket, like we wanted to feed them.’
Rachel picked up the vial and left the bag from the chemist on the table.
‘I got you something else.’ Eliza nodded at the bag. Rachel continued to examine the label on the peppermint oil as though it might list something other than oil of peppermint. After a moment, Eliza turned back to the kitchen counter and poured herself a glass of white wine. She hadn’t intended to buy an ovulation kit on her way home from work, but while in the chemist she had looked around for a present to cheer Rachel up. This is how life’s decisions get made, she thought, you choose a fertility test instead of bubble bath. She looked at the paper bag on the table. The pink box had been pulled out and Rachel was leaning back in her chair with an air of expectation that Eliza felt she couldn’t meet.
‘Thank you.’
Eliza frowned. ‘It’s a start.’
‘Yes.’
They were too tired to wash the skirting board with peppermint oil. Rachel got into bed and glanced down at the floor. She caught Eliza’s eye when she looked up.
‘Nothing.’ Rachel smiled.
Eliza diagnosed it as a non-duchenne smile, a pet subject of hers. It didn’t reach her eyes. Still, Eliza knew she was trying.
Rachel pulled at her pillow. ‘It’s when I’m going to sleep.
I think of them crawling about.’
‘That’s a normal reaction. Like when we think about nits and our scalps feel itchy.’
‘Nits?’ Rachel coughed. ‘Who has nits any more?’
‘Kids have nits. If we had a child we’d get nits.’ Eliza touched Rachel’s hand which was already rubbing the back of her head. ‘You haven’t got nits now!’
‘But we have got ants, Els. I’m not imagining them.’ Eliza brought Rachel’s hand to her lips. ‘I know, my darling.’ She kissed each of Rachel’s plump fingers just below the nail and grazed the tip of the thumb with her teeth.
‘Babies aren’t all bad.’
‘Hmmm?’ Eliza paused.
‘Nothing. Don’t stop. It’s nothing.’ Rachel curved her hand round her girlfriend’s cheek and lay back into the pillows. ‘Don’t stop.’
Eliza leant over her. ‘I bought the test, remember? I read the book. Now, close your eyes and let me kiss you ’til you fall asleep.’
uses crt;
Eliza sat up in a panic. She was in bed, in the dark. Beside her, Rachel pulled at the pillows.
‘Rachel? What is it? What’s the matter?’
‘Something bit me. In my dream, we were in a field and the sun was shining and there was grass. You said, “Stay still” and I tried but . . .” Rachel lifted her pillow. ‘It bit me.’
Eliza struggled to reach for the bedside light. Rachel’s cries had disturbed her own dream. ‘The grass bit you?’
‘In my eye.’
Both women squinted in the dim lamplight. ‘Show me.’
Rachel’s breath caught. ‘It was you. You stabbed me with the grass.’
Eliza felt the sweat cool on her skin as she pushed back the bedclothes.
‘Rachel, you were asleep.’
‘An ant.’ Rachel ran to the full-length mirror that hung behind the door.
‘You had a nightmare.’
‘It’s gone in my eye.’
Eliza sat in the bed and yawned. ‘Come here and let me have a look.’
Rachel perched on the bed and lifted her face to Eliza. Deep by the innermost corner of her eye was a livid red mark.
‘You’ve scratched yourself. Poor baby.’ Eliza put her arms around her shivering girlfriend.
Rachel couldn’t stay still. ‘I don’t think so.’
She walked around the bed and pulled back the bedclothes. They both stared at the damp and wrinkled sheets. There were no ants.
‘Nothing there,’ Eliza said. ‘Do you want some antiseptic? Rachel?’
Rachel had dropped to her hands and knees on the floor. The pine boards were old with a thin layer of varnish. It had taken Eliza and Rachel three days with a rented sander to get them smooth enough to walk on but the wood was still uneven and pitted and some of the gaps were big enough to lose an aspirin through. As Rachel knew well enough.
‘It’s the middle of the night. I’ve got to be at the lab at eight. Please, Rach. Let’s look in the morning.’
‘I won’t sleep.’ Rachel sat on the cold boards and looked up at Eliza. Her wavy hair had formed tight curls at the temples and tears dripped from the scarlet eye.
‘Oh, honey. Hey. Hey there.’ Eliza slid over to Rachel and crouched down on the floor beside her. ‘Ohhh. It’s okay.’
Rachel bent forward and sobbed into the crook of Eliza’s neck. ‘It’s not. It’s not okay. My eye hurts and an ant has gone into my head and you think . . . you think I can’t look after a baby.’
Eliza pushed her girlfriend far enough away to see her face. ‘Where did that come from?’
‘You know it’s true. Every time we talk about it you say you want to go through with it and that Hal is cool. Your egg, my womb, his sperm, like a recipe or a poem. But nothing ever happens and then we’ll be doing something else and you’ll be completely different, really negative, like it would be awful to have a baby. Like tonight . . .” Rachel rushed into the question on Eliza’s lips. ‘Tonight, when you started talking about the nits.’
‘Oh, for god’s sake. Children get nits, that’s not an excuse, it’s just what children do.’
‘But it’s not why you said it. You said it because you thought I couldn’t handle anything; that I don’t know about the real world, about real life. And maybe I don’t.’ Rachel sat and sobbed. Her shoulders heaved and her breath came in shuddering gasps.
Eliza watched her for a minute. She saw the sad and frightened woman in front of her from a distance, as though she was not on the floor with Rachel in their comfortable flat at three o’clock in the morning but looking in through the window on her way to somewhere else in her busy, busy life. In their four years together she had often felt like this, both there and not there, connected, yet keeping a part of herself separate, as though for emergencies. And Rachel had let what Eliza offered be enough. That was the problem with a baby. Not Rachel, who was a bit scatty and did lose things and wasn’t exactly a career woman. None of those things mattered. She loved Rachel, but the baby would use up Eliza’s emergency rations.
‘I don’t.’
Rachel let her breath go. ‘You don’t what?’
‘I don’t think you’ll be a bad mother.’
‘Really?’
Eliza shook her head. ‘You’ll be great at it. Wonderful.
I’m the one to worry about.’
Rachel laughed and wiped at the wetness that had pooled around her nose and mouth. ‘You! You can do anything. You’d rule the world if you wanted to. With those legs.’
They both looked at Eliza’s long legs as she folded them beneath her and sat back on her heels. Rachel’s legs were short and the skin was soft. On other nights, Eliza liked to trace messages on Rachel’s thighs. Nonverbal Communication, she wrote. And, Sensory Pleasure.
They held hands as they knelt in front of each other.
‘We look like we’re getting married, in some ancient ceremony,’ Rachel said, her voice raw from crying.
‘Yes.’
‘We’re going to, aren’t we? We’re going to get married and have a baby. Doesn’t have to be in that order.’ Every crease on her face shone in the lamplight.
‘Yes, my darling.’
They tilted towards each other and rested their foreheads together.
‘Now, this is how you get nits.’ Eliza bumped her head against Rachel’s.
‘Not like this?’ Rachel pushed herself into Eliza, knocking her off balance and landing on top of her.
‘Hey!’
They lay on the floor for a while. This is life, Eliza thought, this is my life.
‘My eye hurts.’
A vision of the future flickered before Eliza. Rachel and their baby huddled on the floor in tears and no one to take care of them except her. All the responsibility of two entirely unreasonable beings. Was she being unfair? Rachel couldn’t possibly believe an ant had gone into her eye. But then, why was she insisting it had? Eliza took a deep breath and reached for any remnants of patience she could find.
‘Here, let me see.’
Rachel was an only child. If they had any babies at all, they had better have at least two. Eliza’s sister would have hit her over the head with their father’s encyclopedia if she’d woken her in the night with tall tales about insects. Standing, Eliza pulled on Rachel’s cheek and looked again.
‘It’s sore. Maybe you should go to the doctor tomorrow.’ Rachel hiccuped.
‘I’ll sleep on your side tonight,’ Eliza said.
They got back into bed and Eliza turned out the light. She felt Rachel’s cold toes press against her calves.
‘Thank you,’ Rachel said. ‘You’re welcome. What for?’
‘For believing me. About the ant.’
(*Here the main program block starts*)
Eliza laid the table for dinner around the box from the chemist that had stayed where she put it the day before.
‘So, what did the doctor say about your eye?’
‘She doesn’t listen to anything I say. It’s you she likes.’
‘I’ve only met her once.’
‘That’s probably why. She thinks I’m weird. Like that guy in the killing and tv shop. Staring.’ Rachel widened her eyes at Eliza and stole a salad leaf from the bowl. ‘She gave me some eye drops and told me to come back if it still hurts even though I told her it had stopped hurting.’
‘The pest controller.’
‘Yeah. Him.’
‘But she looked at it?’
‘Yes. A bit. Maybe I should see a specialist.’
‘An eye specialist?’
‘I don’t know. An eye person? Or that hospital for tropical diseases?’ Rachel looked quite happy at the thought. ‘Maybe it’s a kind of ant that we don’t know about here.’
Eliza put the saucepan of spaghetti on the table and sat down. Images from the night before played on her mind. She had promised Rachel marriage and children but she saw their life together as a mirage, always ahead of them and just out of reach.
‘I don’t think there is a doctor who will know about any of this.’
‘Isn’t that what a specialist is for?’ Rachel said. ‘To investigate further?’
‘Even though your eye is fine?’
‘My eye feels fine now. But after what happened . . .’
‘When what happened?’
‘You were there.’
The future shimmered across the table. A world of possibilities, if only Eliza could believe in them.
‘Eat up.’ Eliza spooned out the pasta, and refilled their glasses. ‘Let’s open that test and get to the fun stuff.’
‘I want to. I really do, it’s what I’ve always wanted. But I need you with me.’
Eliza frowned. ‘I am with you. I’m excited. I said . . .’
‘Not that. I need you to know what I know. To have
faith in me.’
‘What do you mean?’
The tips of Eliza’s fingers tingled with adrenalin. Rachel wasn’t going to let it go.
‘An ant went into my eye. And now it’s stuck there.’
‘Really?’
Rachel looked up at her girlfriend. ‘Yes.’
‘But you had a bad dream.’
‘I know the difference between sleeping and waking. I felt the ant go into my eye.’
’Is that even possible?’
‘It must be.’
She was so sure. Eliza watched as Rachel stroked her eye along the lash line in a delicate sweep, as if not to disturb her visitor.
‘But the doctor didn’t want to refer you?’
‘She was the same when we went to talk about getting pregnant. She didn’t hear me.’
‘And the specialist?’
‘I don’t really think I want one. I mean, it’s there, inside.’ Rachel moved her hand away from her face. ‘I don’t want to have my head cut open.’
‘They wouldn’t do that.’
‘If there’s nothing they can do, there’s no point going.’
‘Right.’
Rachel reached across the table. ’As long as you believe me.’ The mirage of their life together pulled into focus.
‘If you love me, you will trust me,’ Rachel said. ‘Don’t you?’ A small thing. Agree and they could both move into their new relationship in which Eliza had accepted Rachel completely. A small thing and a big thing in one word.
‘Yes.’ She did believe. She believed in Rachel and all that would come with surrender. A future. She didn’t have to understand about the ant, only that it was part of Rachel’s story. The prickles of danger in her fingertips subsided. There was nothing to be frightened of. She had chosen.
Rachel blinked. She reached across the table and took the bag with the test in it. ‘I’m going to do this right now.
Finish your pasta,’ she nodded at Eliza’s plate. ‘I’ll be two minutes.’
begin
It was more than a year before Arthur was born but for Rachel and Eliza he began that evening, Friday 24 October 2003.
‘That was the night we conceived him, really.’ Rachel tapped her head. ‘In the best sense. The rest was like shopping at Homebase; you know you want to do some DIY but you have to buy the equipment first.’
At this, Rachel’s friends would laugh. She was so much more relaxed since she had the baby, they said. Being a mother had really brought out the best in her.
They said it to Rachel’s face and she would smile and blush and not mention the ant. Throughout the conception (in the end they chose IUI), house move (for reasons of space, they agreed), and civil partnership (at Westminster registry office with twenty guests and a heavily pregnant Rachel), they rarely spoke of the events that inspired their new circumstances. When they did, Eliza changed the subject as soon as possible.
Still, by the time of Arthur’s second birthday his origins had become inextricably linked to that day in both his mothers’ minds and Eliza watched Arthur and Rachel blossom, sure in the knowledge that she had almost lost them both. She saw the time before their son as a confused and distant past. She could not have explained why it had asked so much of her to believe in Rachel’s story but since then so many extraordinary things had happened that embracing the possible existence of a single ant seemed almost sensible and while she would never admit that the ant had saved them, she acknowledged that the idea of the ant had been a start. Now she inhabited her life. It was the difference, she thought, between sitting by the side of the pool and actually swimming.
‘Washing up or washing Arthur?’ Rachel walked across the sitting room picking up paper plates and streamers. ‘I can’t believe Hal brought party poppers. They get everywhere.’
‘I think he likes scaring Greg. He jumped a foot in the air every time one went off.’
‘At least Greg came. This wasn’t exactly what he signed up for.’ Rachel smiled.
The two women stood for a moment and surveyed the devastation that a room full of toddlers had wrought. The new house was carpeted, for the sake of Arthur’s knees, though little of the pale green wool showed under the tide of wrapping paper and balloons. Eliza tried not to worry about the cake and cartons of juice she had seen cascading from small fists.
‘Great party though.’ Rachel nodded her head in the direction of the kitchen where Arthur could be seen stacking discarded plastic cups on the floor. ‘He seemed to enjoy himself.’
Eliza put her palm up to Rachel’s cheek and held it. The skin was soft and a little finer than before Arthur, and she wore her hair shorter, surrendered to the curls.
‘It was a fantastic party. Thank you.’
Rachel had organised the party, the way she organised everything now, alone and without fuss. She no longer called Eliza at work because the washing machine wouldn’t drain or her mother had been unkind.
‘Two years.’ Rachel lifted her free hand to Eliza’s and pressed it to her temple. ‘A wild ride.’
Eliza took the plates from her wife and moved to collect the rest. ‘You have a bath with Arthur. I’ll clear up.’
Rachel kept her fingers at her forehead.
‘I do feel it sometimes. As though it’s still there.’
There was always the worry that Rachel would view the day as an anniversary of more than just their child. On the days when they came close to talking about the ant, Eliza would be reminded that for Rachel, the ant was real. Not some metaphor that Eliza could sweep away with an imaginative flourish. She gathered some crisp packets from the floor and hoped Rachel would stop.
‘It can’t be, though. Living inside me, in my head. But I feel it,’ Rachel said.
Eliza felt the blood rush to her face.
‘I know you don’t like to talk about it,’ Rachel continued. ‘We should do, I think. On days like this.’
As though the conversation were not always with them, running alongside their lives like tickertape.
‘What? What do you want to talk about? An ant?’ Streamers and crisps scattered between Eliza’s feet. ‘I did everything, Rachel. I believed you. I changed it all for you. We have a life. If you keep going on about the ant . . . people will think you’re crazy.’
‘Mum?’ Arthur ran through the doorway, his bare legs dripping from the dregs in the party cups.
Eliza lifted him off the floor and squeezed him hard. ‘It’s alright, baby.’
‘Will they?’ Rachel said. ‘Eliza, please. Stay and talk.’
‘He needs a bath,’ Eliza carried their sticky son into the
hallway and up the stairs, Rachel’s face staring back at her as she dropped Arthur into a few inches of lukewarm water and a trough of bubbles.
He looked so like Rachel, dark haired and olive skinned and something else, something removed from both Hal’s family and Rachel’s, an old-fashioned far away set to his eyes and brow, as though he had waged some mythical battle with the gods and been punished with the life of a human boy. Eliza didn’t believe in anything of the sort, but having a child had rounded the edges of her cynicism. It was impossible to deny the importance of imagination when your son demanded you investigate its powers daily. And all along there had been Rachel, placing her own fantasy at the centre of her family. Their family. She rubbed a flannel along Arthur’s stocky legs. Very well. If Rachel was troubled, if she needed to talk, then it was up to Eliza to help her.
writeln
Dr Marshall’s front door was on the side of the house, facing away from the street. A gravel path led from the gate to the neat porch where a pair of doorbells were marked ‘House’ and ‘Dr Marshall’.
‘Think of all the patients who are tempted to press the other one.’ Rachel grazed her fingers over the two bells.
‘You included.’
‘I’d like to see what happened.’
The door swung open and an older woman in a paisley wraparound dress stepped forward to greet them. She extended her arm towards the hallway. Dr Marshall didn’t do handshakes.
It had taken six months to find a therapist they both liked and in the end it was a friend of Hal’s who recommended Sondra Marshall. Her academic background suited Eliza who was anxious about qualifications, and her modern approach impressed Rachel who did not want a Freudian analysis. She was also American, which pleased them both since it removed her from their immediate frame of reference. As though the therapist’s mind were neutral territory upon which they could meet.
This was their first visit although they had spoken to Dr Marshall on the phone. As they walked into the consu