Brent and Kevin hike near the edge of the park, the cornfields farther west scarcely visible through occasional gaps in the trees. One is jubilant and intrepid, the other restrained and skeptical.
   Still holding the leaf, Brent shares, “It all makes sense to me, like God is spelling it out with footnotes.”
   Kevin, with a wrinkled stare, is questioning how much of this optimism is speed-fueled deduction and how much is speed-fueled delusion, both being likely. “It’s too easy to go from the pit of faithless despair to the mountaintop of divine insight.”
   Laughing, his eyes their wide wildest, “Easy?!”
   “With the speed. Got no reason, your mind knows the false power it’s being fed. But with any purpose, speed makes whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re believing, the greatest thing ever.”
   Brent considers this for a split-second. “I see what you’re saying, but I’m onto something more than my high.”
   “A leaf?”
   They stop on the trail and Brent admires the leaf, holding it up in fascination. It is not such a rare or beautiful thing, mostly a burnt red, though some bands of deep green and orange give it distinction.
   While he twirls the leaf, Brent looks at it – and behind it, to Kevin. He recognizes the doubt. “Why not? God is in all life, in all things. This leaf is as much God as anything else.”
   “Do you honestly believe God sent you a personal message in that leaf?”
   “I do! It was like a wake-up call, to see how it’s all connected.”
   Working his way up to the hard part, “I like you, Brent. You’re a good guy and even though I don’t call too many people friend, I think you’d be a cool friend to have. But I’m fairly certain you’re off your nut.”
   “Kevin, I can tell you –”
   “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying your ideas are ludicrous or that your inspiration’s irrelevant.”
   With longanimity, Brent sustains, “Thank you, but I can explai–”
   “But you probably want to finish this amphetamine ride, sleep on it, and see if you can even remember any of this. If you can, then you probably won’t believe it when you get back to normal.”
   Stunned, “Normal? To hell with normal! You’re the last person I’d expect to say something like that.”
   Kevin, from toxic chemical memory, “Trust me, the abnormal frame of mind is not the one to base your daily life on.”
   “Normal is an arbitrary construct.” Brent’s pace picks up from the meth. “It insulates us from all the unpredictability of the universe, of life, of ourselves. It’s an artificial order that is neither inherent nor needed. Between you and me, we can chuck normal out the window.”
   Kevin starts to argue, but recalls his own words in jail.
   Like a man possessed, Brent’s eyes are bulbous, his expression maniacal, and the veins bulge on his forehead and arms. Yet there’s also a kind of visionary innocence.
   “Okay, forget normal. Tell me about the leaf.”
   “The leaf was meant for me.” Brent testifies, “It was meant to strike me in the eye.”
   “It seemed like a random coincidence to me. Why doesn’t it to you?”
   “From what we can prove, it was a random coincidence.”
   “You’re supposed to make your case, not mine,” Kevin says.
   “Are you at all acquainted with some of the modern theories in science, in physics?”
   “You’re gonna use science to show me God? I can’t wait for this.”
   Brent smiles confidently but looks no more sane. “Have you heard of chaos theory?”
   “Only in movies.”
   “Um, assuming that source is not …”
   “Worth shit?”
   “Exactly. I’ll try to give you the basics.”
   “This has to do with the leaf?”
   “This has to do with everything.” Brent starts hiking again, the leaf a lead for him and Kevin. “The classic physical sciences will describe gravity and wind and all the principal forces at work – plant biology and meteorology, photosynthesis and the like – but it wouldn’t explain why this leaf hit me.”
   “Because of where you were sitting?”
   Counter-cocky stare, “Clever.”
   “But it goes with the forces behind it. Why did the leaf poke you in the eye? Your location and gravity and the wind. Maybe science wouldn’t explain the metaphysical why, but that’s not science’s job.”
   “Science has been trying to get at the order behind the universe since the first deductive human thought.” Brent, from amphetamine bravado, “Science is the exploration for, if not God, the thing that has been called God, by every name, throughout time.”
   Kevin shrugs, “I’ll buy that. But if God was sending you a message with that leaf, you wouldn’t have gotten it if you were sitting a foot to the left.”
   “I wasn’t sitting a foot to the left, and the leaf didn’t fall ten minutes earlier or ten minutes later. That’s thanks to chaos. But where and how it fell is mostly due to classical mechanics.”
   “Classical mechanics are what? Greek cart technicians?”
   Giving the bad pun a stupid grin, Brent stays on track. “Newtonian physics. Gravity and calculus, force and motion.”
   “And classical mechanics doesn’t need chaos theory?”
   “No. Most things don’t, unless they are part of a more complex system that develops from, uh, variable variables.”
   Kevin lights up like something has clicked until he scowls, once more confounded. “A complex system like …?”
   “Like the weather. Like how the wind blows.”
   “They use chaos theory with the weather? Are they not using it right?”
   “Chaos theory tries to predict the behavior of dynamic systems with multiple variables that could lead to radically different outcomes. It would ask how the jet stream that played a part in moving the leaf was influenced by a whale blowing out its spout in the Pacific six months ago. With chaos models, they can make pretty accurate forecasts for, say, the next few days. But the chaos of the weather patterns themselves makes them highly unpredictable beyond that.”
   “A few days? That can’t be too useful. I wonder if they predicted all the chaos in the storm last night – I did not hear anything about purple lightning,” Kevin discloses.
   “You saw that too? That was definitely outside the usual patterns.”
   “Except crazy weather isn’t so unusual anymore.”
   “Tragically. Chaos came to prominence with climate change, in fact.” Though demoralized in the digression, Brent talks faster again. “Edward Lorenz was a meteorologist studying the vulnerability of our climate through thermal movement in the atmosphere known as convection rolls. He spearheaded chaos theory. His diagram of convection roll equations, the Lorenz attractor, makes a shape that resembles butterfly wings.”
   “Butterfly wings?” In partial savvy, Kevin smiles. “Like the butterfly effect? That’s from chaos theory?”
   “It is. Lorenz wrote papers about it and gave a talk entitled Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”
   “What a title.”
   “Effective though, isn’t it? Lorenz credits Philip Merilees with coming up with it, but it’s said it was an accident.”
   “More chaos.”
   “What do you mean?” Brent asks.
   “An accidental name turned into the most common buzzword for what chaos theory is about.”
   “Wow, it’s true. The idea of a butterfly made a philosophical tornado.”
   “That’s not – he didn’t really mean a butterfly can make a tornado, did he?”
   Brent nods as his friend catches on. “He was hypothesizing that if the butterfly flapped its wings differently, the tornado might not happen, or it might end up in Oklahoma.”
   With barely stifled incredulity, “But how could it?”
   “It could be an early condition in a weather system that then became a tornado.”
   “Wait. Wait, wait, wait.” Kevin’s intrigued again. “I thought you were gonna tell me how that leaf was a message from God.”
   Brent lets go of the leaf and it drifts in the air, traveling a good ways. Catching a gentle updraft, it spins and floats on, out of sight.
   Kevin watches it with interest, “That was random.”
   “Nothing is random, everything moves within some pattern or other, and is perpetually impacted by everything else. Chaos is the order of the cosmos.”
   “That’s why you brought up chaos theory?”
   “Mainly.”
   Pointing in the direction of the dropped leaf. “But –”
   “We’re getting there. So there is no overt hierarchy in the universe. You put a butterfly next to a tornado – the butterfly is toast. Even though the butterfly can be one of the reasons that tornado exists. Everything is significant, everything is uniquely powerful and relevant in the big picture.”
   “I’m starting to get – I think – where you’re coming from.”
   “Excellent! So, how familiar are you with quantum mechanics?”
   Dry, “Less than I am with chaos theory.”
   “Quantum mechanics tries to qualify the atomic activity that defies classical mechanics.” Brent slows down to be clear, but the meth soon has him back in high gear. “I’m oversimplifying, but I want to build on what we’re working with.”
   “So that apple drops on Newton’s head, and he discovers gravity, and that’s classical mechanics?”
   “Special and general relativity make for some differences at the scale of galaxies and black holes, when high velocity or extraordinary gravity come into play. But gravity and electromagnetism make the rules for most things, from apples to planets, even stars.”
   “But they don’t work on the small things?”
   “Not the really small things, like atoms and smaller.”
   “How do scientists even know?”
   “Because what traditional physics tells us the particles will do doesn’t work.”
   “How do they know what those particles are doing, though?”
   “The earliest studies were of waves of water and light. Electron microscopes came later, around 1930, but particle accelerators – synchrotrons and heavy ion colliders – provide us with the most information nowadays.”
   Kevin jests, “Oh, those.”
   “They use electromagnets to accelerate and collide the tiny, elementary atomic particles like quarks and photons and see how they behave.”
   “And I take it they misbehave?”
   “They display some very odd qualities that defy many of the physical laws that came before. Their actions can’t be predicted by classical mechanics. Scientists have identified strong and weak nuclear forces at work, but still are unable to pin down all the variables involved.”
   “Like what?”
   “Quantum entanglement … or self-interference.” Kevin gives him a blank look and Brent clarifies, “Subatomic particles have qualities, one of them being spin, and some of them are related beyond any local effect. Physicists found that two particles, separated after interacting together, would be entangled. They would balance each other, one with up-spin and one with down-spin, though there was no longer a tangible connection between them.”
   “Like they were still affecting each other even when they weren’t together?”
   “Mmhmm. And then there was an early experiment by Thomas Young to demonstrate the wave-like qualities of light. He caught pinholes of sunlight in a darkened room. He projected those rays through a solid divider with two slits in it, to show their pattern on a far wall. There was interference in the diffraction on the other side.”
   Swimming in the abstractions again, “Interference and diffraction are what on that level?”
   “They made waves like two rocks might make, dropped in water near each other at the same time. This experiment became fundamental to our understanding of light being both wave-like, as Young proved, and particle-like, as Newton himself theorized. Modern variations by other scientists take it even further. Using lasers, they can fire photons one at a time at double slits. A series of individual photons fired like that will still make an interference pattern, from self-interference.”
   “That’s bad?”
   “That’s weird. The photon, passing through a slit, is detected on the other side. Logically, each photon should only pass through one of the slits, but they appeared to be either going through both, or to be aware of both of them.”
   “Aware? You don’t mean –”
   “This isn’t what most physicists would tell you,” Brent red flags. “They would attribute it to light’s wave-particle duality. But I take it to mean they’re conscious.”
   Sure he’s being pranked, “Are you shitting me?”
   “The theories that account for what they were seeing on the subatomic level made for some very tricky math, but all that tricky math revolved around the photons’ unpredictability. You simply cannot predetermine which slit a photon will pass through or where it will land. To me, each photon is making a choice.”
   “About?”
   “Where they’re going and why.”
   “I don’t get it.”
   “Nobody gets it. There has been some debunking, but there’s no irrefutable explanation about photon ‘choices’ that precludes photon consciousness.”
   Kevin suspends his disbelief. “You’re melting my brain.”
   “We could philosophize about the nature of consciousness, but let’s say the energetic part of matter on the most rudimentary level has something akin to consciousness, a self- and other-awareness.”
   Flip rhetoric, “So the sub-atoms in the leaf made it jump in your eye!”
   “Not quite.”
   “No?” Kevin runs a hand through his hair. “If it wasn’t random and it wasn’t quark attraction, what made the leaf hit your eye?”
   “Something in between. Something unpredictable but interconnected with everything. Many scientists have tried to uncover that force, including Albert Einstein. He reasoned there must have been some missing piece to our knowledge and spent the end of his life determined to uncover that piece. He failed to find it.”
   “So Einstein wasn’t such an Einstein about that?”
   Brent defends the cogent line, “He wanted some simple, elegant solution to the mystery of subatomic unpredictability. What he found were things like quantum entanglement, what Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance.’”
   “That seemed like the particles had awareness?”
   “Or that they were motivated by forces we have yet to discover. Scientists today are working on theories that unify the classical and the quantum, and even Einstein’s relativity.” Brent’s avid, the speed still potent, but he’s calmer for the moment. “One of them is string theory.”
   “I’ve heard of that – on a PBS special once, some way-out-there physicist guy, Kuko?”
   “Kaku, Michio Kaku. He’s brilliant. So you get string theory?”
   “I sort of did, but then he’s talking about multiple dimensions – I got nothing.”
   “Those extra dimensions are mostly vectors on a graph that make it mathematically consistent. We can plot it even if we can’t picture an everyday example. But string theory might yet be the first successful unified theory. And it ties in with the leaf.”
   Kevin’s gaze intensifies, “Ahh! We’re getting somewhere!”
   “Basically, string theory allows the divergent theories to play nicely together, including relativity and gravity and the classical stuff. The earliest models for the quantum universe used zero-dimensional particles as the building blocks of atoms. But those blocks didn’t complete the form, there was mass and energy that still wasn’t accounted for.”
   “Like dark matter?” Kevin infers.
   “Yeah. Kaku special again?”
   “YouTube tangent.”
   “In between pet videos?”
   “Well, ya know …”
   Brent elaborates, “So there’s dark energy as well as dark matter. Physicists now believe that those two make up most of what we know as the universe. Dark energy could be what keeps the universe expanding faster from the Big Bang. Dark matter is thought to be the mass of an undiscovered subatomic particle, one of the things they’re looking for with ion colliders. In the midst of this is something that keeps our material world together. And it might be strings.
   “String theory ditches the zero-dimensional particles that quantum mechanics gets stuck on and replaces them with one-dimensional strings. The vibrations of these strings form the different subatomic particles – like electrons and quarks – and their resonance is what makes matter as we know it. Their harmony, across the universe, surrounded by all that darkness.
   “It’s still only a theory, not proven in any way, but it does show how forces across all dimensions, from macrocosm to microcosm, can interplay. Above and below come together.”
   Kevin, calling the game of ideas as a game of poker, “You still haven’t said shit about the leaf, Brent.”
   “If the resonance of these strings makes up the whole of the cosmos – not only the elementary parts of it, but the very force that keeps it flowing together – and there is a kind of consciousness on that level, then all things are endowed with this awareness from within. Though we can’t predict it and we can’t yet prove it, there is something at work there.”
   “That’s good, I like it. Maybe it’s the tricky math that gets in the way?”
   “Maybe. And most scientists accepted that – or that they hadn’t worked out all the tricks in the math – and they dismissed an easy conclusion to their early findings.”
   “Which was?”
   “That there is not only consciousness at that level, but a collective consciousness, a cosmic self-awareness. An awareness that courses through the whole of the universe. A unified mind.” He leaves the last words hanging.
   Kevin peers at him, flummoxed, then resolves, “God?”
   “If God is life, God is also consciousness. Without our consciousness we would not seek nor probably ever conceive of God.”
   With new possibilities, Kevin is curious. “Animals have consciousness, why don’t they worship God?”
   “Animals don’t have religions, but we can’t say that they don’t have God.”
   Kevin sneers, and rather than humoring his friend, “I had a cat. From what I saw, she only cared about food, sleep, and a good back rub. If that cat had a god, it was the space heater.”
   “But some cats know when earthquakes are coming.”
   “I’ll give you that one. But that makes them faithful?”
   “That makes them more finely attuned to a higher consciousness. Not to metaphysics or theology or good and evil, not to the theories that humanity has about God. But from the most minuscule pulsations in the ground, in the air, they are attuned to the systemic force that is life, that is the universe, that is God.” Brent walks briskly down the trail.
   Kevin lags, engrossed. A smirk creeps up one corner of his mouth as he sticks a cig in the other, saying to himself, “You still haven’t said shit about the leaf.”
   He’s frozen by a mad howl, much closer than before.