2025-09-17

Cale wasn’t exactly sure where the smoke went, metaphysically speaking. It streamed from the blunt he was suspending from the dorm window—not the standard double-hung sash but newer Euro-style casement that opened inward along an improbable diagonal hinge, an arrangement that required him to crook his harm beneath the frame, forcing him into a pose less cool and more desperate-seeming. Solomon had once delivered a whole mini-lecture on what made this a superior setup (better airflow creators, fewer leaks, easier cleaning from the inside, etc.), but this didn’t prevent Cale from feeling like an animal stuck in a trap.

Beyond the pane, at any rate, was nothing. Well: his hand, the blunt, the little curlicues of smoke that floated up in haphazard seeming yet—according to Solomon, who’d scrawled equations on the back of a pizza box to prove as much—were entirely deterministic per Navier-Stokes equations. “Turbulent but not random” Cale’s roommate had said flatly, like a priest reciting liturgy. Which was fine, except that Cale couldn’t square what exactly the smoke was rising through in the first place, since as far as he could tell this particular Out There was all void. In that case the smoke should just wink out of existence, unless of course it dragged its own pocket of air along or one of the other theories that Solomon had written in his notes. Regardless, this Out There certainly seemed like nothing, blacker-than-black, like the gaps between stars in the Out There’s lucky enough to have stars. He smoked here mainly because Solomon was at it again—commandeering the dorm room like a grad lab that had misplaced its institutional funding. Wires slumped across desks, coat-hanger tripods sprouted from the floor, and the better part of Cale’s bed was buried under cameras, heatsinks, and spools of fiber optics Solomon claimed were “for the boundary-layer experiments.” Cale didn’t bother asking which boundary or what layer. He just tried to stay out of the way, watching while Solomon adjusted dials and muttered about refractive indices, laminar regimes, and “the really interesting turbulence right at the threshold.” And though Cale had to admit he liked watching the Out There swirl—when Solomon’s contraptions got going the darkness folded over itself in currents like suds sloshing in a washing machine—the whole controlled-emptiness thing wasn’t exactly restful. It kept his stomach steady, sure, but not his nerves. He left Solomon to his wires and walked the hall. The dorm still looked like a dorm if you didn’t pay attention: same humming fluorescents with that faint flicker that made your temples pulse, same industrial-beige carpet stamped with anonymous stains, same corkboard by the stairwell sagging under flyers for movie nights and club elections scheduled for dates passed weeks ago. People kept some of the rituals going—flashcards stacked, problem sets completed, even the occasional halfhearted study group—on the theory that when-slash-if the dorm finally snapped back into its slot, you wouldn’t want to be the guy who hadn’t at least kept up with your midterms. But the windows made it harder to pretend. He left Solomon to his wires and walked the hall, which remained as it had always been: industrial carpeting whose exact shade defined description, somewhere between beige and taupe the manufacturer had designed to hide stains, though the stains were still visible from particular angles; humming fluorescent bars felt more in the molars than the ears; a corkboard with flyers for movie nights and club elections long gone. People still studied for tests that would never be administered—flash cards, problem sets, someone murmuring French conjugations in a stairwell—because the possibility, however vanishing, of a return demanded from some at least the posture of preparation. Wexler’s door came first, propped with a sneaker (the left one, with a hole over the big toe). Inside: aquariums (plural), none with fish, only the sound of water looping through filters like an artificial brook, and his Out There looking at first like heat rising off pavement in August and then, when you stared and couldn’t understand-see it anymore, like stacked rivers, planes of water slipping over one another in unmappable directions, until the whole thing felt tilted and you had to grab the doorframe. Wexler insisted if you pressed your ear to the sill you could hear rapids, which Cale thought was horseshit until he considered the outrageous experiments being run in his own room. Jani’s room was cedar and detergent, sweaters folded in so many strata that you could almost imagine digging down and finding older geological layers of sweaters beneath. She was knitting with earbuds in, not glancing down once, her hands moving with the strange autonomy of sleepwalkers. Out her window was a pale drift, neither fog nor smoke but threads, fibers, filaments—every term seemed slightly wrong—and they swayed in a way too patterned to be wind. Once Cale saw arches forming, over structures, like something that might’ve been built and then abandoned, though the moment he blinked it collapsed back to mist. Jani didn’t acknowledge him; perhaps she hadn’t even seen. Patel’s room could be heard halfway down the hall, the bass thudding from three speakers aimed directly at the window like weapons. His Out There seemed to grid itself into a strict geometry, merging into lines and shapes, but collapsing on the next beat. Cale thought—no, knew—he saw small figures twitching into shape in the lattice, jerking into place like marionettes, until the next bass drop scattered them. Patel shouted something about “resonance,” about vibing with his Out There, which Cale thought was nonsense but didn’t immediately rule out given the presence of those figures. Other rooms: glimpses. A labyrinth doubling back on itself with innumerable turns. A plain under clouds dragging shadows over half-submerged shapes (pillars? ruins?). A briny stark that stung your nose like tidepools left too long in the sun. Each one was a checkmark in Cale’s head, the kind of mental list you kept when there was nothing else to do but keep lists, as if the catalog itself might amount to an answer. By the time he got back to his own door Solomon’s voice was already audible, muttering equations like a priest humming psalms. The room itself was unrecognizable: wires looping, cameras angled, the world being their casement tortured into sudsing-machine swirls. Controlled nothingness, almost restful if you ignored how much work it took to make it behave. Other Out Theres hadn’t looked like that. Theirs looked—uncomfortably—like somewhere.