Over the last few months, Peter had been distracted by the feeling that there was something or someone just beyond his peripheral vision. He would be going about his daily business when suddenly he would get a glimpse of some blue shape in the corner of his eye, but every time he turned his head, it was gone. These episodes were bothersome, but he just tried his best to ignore them, not let them interfere with his work.
Peter was an accountant; he didn’t have much imagination. He knew accountants with imagination could be dangerous. You depend on them to sort, order, and classify your earnings and expenses, so if they were creative, who knows what would happen to your hard-earned money? So, in the end, he accepted these blue apparitions, as just that, blue apparitions.
Peter’s wife, Julia, was a talented dress designer. Imagination was her strong suit. You could find many of her creations in the better, high-end fashion shops. She had a flair for design and could always find ways of combine boring, unimaginative things into iconic fashion statements. She performed fashion alchemy.
Their daughter Olivia, in her own way, took after both of them. From her father, she got attention to detail, from her mother, she got creativity and vision, and from herself, she got a passion for Quantum Physics. Her parents didn’t share this passion, their eyes would just glaze over whenever Olivia started talking about the colour of Quarks and Muons with topspin.
Olivia had done exceptionally well as an undergrad at McGill and got a scholarship for postgrad physics at Princeton University. A few years later, she did postdoctoral research at the famous Institute for Advanced Study, where Einstein had once taught. But as successful as Olivia was, she always found it difficult to be away from her mother and father, and the moral support they gave. They were a close-knit family, but Olivia’s career called loudly, and so she went.
Peter worked at the same accounting firm in downtown Montreal for over thirty years. He was a creature of habit and drove to work using the same route everyday. He had done it so often; he could do it blindfolded. It was an hour on the expressway, then ten minutes on the back roads.
The commute wasn’t a problem when the weather was good, but there were a few intersections that could be dangerous in bad weather. Like one day last spring, the rain was coming down in buckets, visibility and reaction time was much reduced, a logging truck was barreling down the steep mountain road towards the intersection but couldn’t stop because of the rain.
Peter was lucky that day. If he hadn’t glimpsed blue out of the corner of his eye, he would have been crushed by the oncoming truck… As it was, he had an extra split second to swerve and only hit the truck’s back wheel. The car and was totalled, but thanks to his airbag, he was only moderately injured. He was convinced it was the blue apparition that made him notice the truck in his peripheral vision.
That was the last time he saw the apparition. He surmised, his concussion during the accident must have cured him. He missed it, though. Somehow, it had a reassuring effect, like a guardian angel.
Now, fully recovered, Peter was spending a few days in Princeton visiting Olivia. Yesterday he heard her give a lecture about Quantum Entanglement and Time Travel. Today, he was visiting her lab, where she was showing him her prototype, time-travelling-suit. It was like the “Blue Man Group” costume, a full bodysuit with no holes, made from Lycra with a phase-shifted, graphene lining.
Peter was so proud of Olivia. But that also brought tears to his eyes as he thought about his wife, Julia. Peter wished she could have been there; she would have been beaming with pride. Unfortunately, she was killed in a car crash six months ago, on that same eventful day, while rushing to the hospital to be with him.