1  Invisible Bubbles

Luca Cangemi takes the stage. He sweeps the greying hair out of his eyes and considers the rows of red seats. Before lectures, he still likes to experience the space and imagine his words sailing out to waiting ears. Will this one inspire?

Perhaps it’s cliché for a tenured professor to carry a battered leather briefcase, but it has sentimental value. It wears its age like a set of war medals. Since his mother presented it to him at graduation, he’s taken it everywhere. As long as he keeps repairing broken straps and clasps, she’ll be with him.

He takes in the details of the room – the grain of the wooden lectern, wall lights studded at intervals, that ‘new car’ smell. Humanities 1 is the biggest lecture theatre in this London university, and this will be the most important lecture of his career.

For a moment, Luca ponders the subject that has consumed his life: the duality of time. For those listening, his lecture will provide some kind of mutual reality, but what does that matter if experience is ultimately individual? He’s given hundreds of lectures, thousands maybe. They both inspire and exhaust him. He remembers his student days in Perugia. Gisella. A relationship, a realisation, a beautiful conversation that was both shared and deeply personal. Now he struggles to make small talk with his estranged wife when picking up Alicia.

9:52 am. Someone tries the door. It will remain locked until five minutes before the event. The students attending his first rendition of An Introduction to The Philosophy of Time will come from different disciplines – sciences, the arts. His work draws people together, just as time does. In the next hour, they will learn everything Luca Cangemi knows about the subject, in condensed form.

He spends his last minutes before the doors open dreaming of those two weeks with Gisella.

Luca sets the coffee pot on the stove, then goes back to bed. “It’s the afternoon already,” he says to the girl looking out of the window.

“And?”

Their scent permeates the room. It is the entire history of their brief relationship.

As a nineteen year-old undergraduate in the old city of Perugia, Luca’s lucky to have a studio flat arranged by his aunt. Dark wood, sun-faded wallpaper and zealous pictures of Jesus on the cross. When he moved in, he didn’t bring much more than his notebooks and a holdall. He watches Gisella observe the people in the square below. The muscular detail of her back is hidden by a cascade of espresso-black hair. After two weeks of sharing the apartment, Luca is still no closer to understanding what drives her.

“Tell me about this theory again,” she says, still gazing at the street.

Luca replies from his side of the crumpled bed. “What I said about the bubbles? It’s more of a thought, really.”

“Whatever it is, I love it.”

“It’s that,” he says, looking at the ceiling, “time exists in invisible bubbles. Billions of them, which change in shape and size. They can fit inside your head or be as big as the ocean. This is your experience.”

Gisella, who is supposed to be in a linguistics lecture, looks over at her young sage. “And this room is the bubble for us?”

Luca wants to say yes. He wants to experience ‘oneness’ with Gisella and leave the apartment only for pastries and bottles of beer to share, but this visualisation of time occupies him even more than her questions, her secrets, and the scent of the two of them. “Everyone lives a different actuality, so, of the billions of different bubbles, we never exist in the same one.”

She turns and asks Luca if they are in the same one when they make love.

Whichever invisible bubble he is in bursts. Whatever he says will be too honest or dishonest, too calculated and scientific or too vague and philosophical. He cycles through his options, calculating how to turn around this chess match from a losing position. The outcome remains the same. Mate.

She pulls on a t-shirt and flicks out her hair. “Really? Not even if we are thinking the same thing?”

Again, he wants to say yes, but instead, he babbles something about shared dreams. He can’t even remember where he read the idea about bubbles. The rumble of the coffee pot from the kitchen snaps them out of their individual thoughts, and back into the room.

Gisella walks around the bed, passing under the painting of a wounded Jesus. She stops with her hand on the door. “It’s a shame you can’t see the bubbles inside the coffee pot when it’s hot. You could test your theory.”

Luca lies back and smiles.

She opens the door and walks out. The presence of the two of them that was trapped in the sheets and the walls and curtains follows her out into the corridor.

Time elapsed: 80ml of water, evaporated through roasted beans and poured to serve in two tiny cups