Nostalgia Report

What will it be like when entropy decreases?

I took an egg from the ramekin and cracked it on the side of the pan, then flicked on the miniature black-and-white TV that sat on the kitchen counter. I had put the TV there a year earlier when I’d moved into this bachelor apartment, a random choice that stuck. On the news, they were interviewing a man — a physicist, I soon gathered, from the dyspeptic chiron — with an accent that hailed from east of the Rhine. “All the signs tell us that entropy is decreasing now,” he was saying. “In the first phase of the universe, entropy increased, which is to say disorder increased. Our houses got messier; gases mixed until they reached equilibrium; the universe expanded and thinned out. The trend has reversed.”

It was a pronouncement that seemed both lunatic and quotidian, delivered, as it was, while I cooked a humble breakfast. I was reminded of my kid brother’s words when we’d spoken in April. “All of a sudden, things are clicking,” he’d told me. “This series of odd jobs that you all thought was disconnected, this string of quote-unquote ‘failed relationships’ — they’ve all put me on the path to where I am right now. Tonight, for the first time, I feel like I understand my life, like I can grasp it in a single instant.” He was calling me from a lighthouse, he said. His breathing was audible while he spoke. I could picture him in mismatched clothes, a towheaded baby. “Terrific,” I said, because what else would I say?

Nevertheless, I was aware of a parallel feeling in my own mind that morning. While I sipped my coffee, I watched the dawn colors coalesce in an almost hallucinatory fashion, and though I was unclear whether this phenomenon was rooted in reality, it guided me like an oracle. A mist of nostalgia that had trailed me since my college days formed into a bead — something tangible, something, indeed, that you could grasp in an instant. There was meaning beneath the works and days of my life. I was certain!

“Local pockets of disorder may persist,” the physicist continued, “but globally, which is to say universally, we are marching toward order.”

A sharp knock rattled my apartment door. I ran to open it, and Sheila, my wife (my ex-wife, per the legal documents) rushed in and kissed me, making lamentations about the colossal mistake we’d made. We had been each other’s sweethearts from the beginning. We were mad to have considered divorce! I took her by the elbow, guided her to the kitchen, and showed her the TV. The physicist — whose accent, I now realized, mirrored that of the waiter in Dubrovnik, where long ago Sheila and I had honeymooned — fielded a question from the press with a bemused grin: “No, people won’t age backwards. No, not at all.” 

“Forget him,” Sheila said. She turned the TV off and wrapped her arms around my neck. The scent of her perfume enveloped me in her memory, battling the present moment. A tear, nearly born, crawled back into the red of my eye. Over her shoulder, I saw the breakfast that I had been in the midst of preparing. The pan was empty. In the ramekin lay an unbroken egg.