The Half-Life of Wanting

The detector clicked once, then twice, then settled into the patient arrhythmia of a thing coming apart. Priya had heard the sound ten thousand times. She had never heard it the way she heard it now, with Daniel's shoulder a careful inch from hers in the dark of the counting room.

"You always lean in at the resonance," he said. He did not look at her. He looked at the oscilloscope, where a green line drew and redrew its small green mountains.

"I lean in," she said, "because you set the gain too low. I can barely see it."

"You can see everything." He said it lightly, the way you say a thing you have rehearsed until it sounds unrehearsed. The detector clicked. Somewhere inside the lead castle a single atom had decided, after four and a half billion years, that now was the moment.

Priya thought about half-lives. About how you could never say when one nucleus would go, only that half of any crowd of them would be gone by a certain hour. You could not predict the one. You could only love the many and wait.

"Daniel," she said.

"Mm."

"What's the half-life of this." She did not phrase it as a question. The green line climbed. The room held its small radioactive breath.

He turned, finally, and the gain was exactly right, and she saw everything. "Undefined," he said. "It isn't decaying."

The detector clicked, and for once neither of them wrote it down.