The Lawrence Goss

“Have you heard?” Dan.
“What?”
“Well, do you know why Lawrence isn’t in?”
“Hangover? Suspended for swearing at pupils? Could be any number of things.”
“No. He’s been on a killing spree. It was on the news. Don’t you know anything?”
“I detest the news.”
“Ok, whatever. Anyway. He’s in custody in Cambridge. This weekend he went down for some reunion or something. He’s killed five of his contemporaries. He did it with a hammer!”
“That’ll do it, certainly. Not what I’d have guessed for his weapon of choice. I’d always thought of him more as a bare-hands kind of killer.””Yes. That would have been more aesthetically pleasing. If he’d snapped their necks or just ninja’d them to death.”
“OK. Details. Who? Why?””They didn’t say. But apparently they were all pretty high-fliers. One of them was a TV presenter. They had his colleague on. She was practically weeping.”
“Jealousy. Yeah he did sometimes seem to be bearing the huge burden of an unfulfilled potential. I feel bad. He didn’t find teaching us rewarding.”
“I’m sure he found teaching us hugely rewarding. But we are rather special.””The crème de la crème.”
“Precisely.”
“We should write him a letter of support.”
“We should do interviews with the media in which we say he seemed so normal and gentle, kept himself to himself.””No. We should do interviews with Sky TV in which we say he was clearly having a psychotic episode and that his employers are to blame for not supporting him with his work-related stress. We’d seen the signs. Personality change. Lack of motivation. Poor hygiene.”
“Okay. I’ll play.”
Mark felt his affection for Mr. Lawrence as a swelling around his chest. It was as if his body was becoming larger. An energy that was all him enveloping the air around him so that he felt warm. They were fellow-killers. The timing was so perfect. He played around with the notion that just as he had been draining the life from the tramp in the park, Mr. Lawrence had been hammering out his issues with his old college buddies. Hammering them out into the old college bodies. Why the hammer? Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. Well, Mansun quoted Helter Skelter as an influence, why not go for the obvious. Bang, bang. Lawrence’s steel hammer made sure that they were dead. Note to self: re-evaluate the no weapons rule. Nothing to prove now anyway.
In the school car-park Mark spotted the TV news van. Normally you only see these things on results day. The sliding doors open to reveal racks of audio-visual equipment. On the roof there’s a white satellite dish. We’re live at Leeds Posh School for Boys. Peter Lawrence, a history teacher with 8 years experience has been arrested in Cambridge for the murder of 5 people on Saturday night. Police said they were shocked by the ferocity of the attacks and the feral cunning of the attractive 34 year old. You could almost see the reflection of his steel-blue eyes in their faces. Police were stunned by his audacity. He left a trail of bodies like a macabre Hansel and Gretel. They followed the series of rapidly-cooling corpses to where he sat, cradling his weapon, silently contemplating the weeping willow whose tendrils brushed the calm surface of the river Cam. He did not resist arrest and immediately made a full confession.
The head teacher was down there. Giving a brief statement. They were not going to allow any of the students to talk to the media at this time. Not much they could do after school. The head said she was stunned by what had happened. Peter Lawrence was a well-respected colleague … blah, blah, blah.

Anyway. Physics. They had been “doing about” the science of the atomic bomb. Their teacher was quite into it. There was this whole thing where they were supposed to make it into a cross-curricular project. Some people were doing art-work. Dan had read some huge tome on Los Alamos and was trying to write a brief article - putting the bomb into historical perspective.
“Mark, have a look at this.”
“What?”
“This guy – Red Leader Merony – he flew a plane into the Mike fireball.”
“Who? What? Red Leader – sound like freaking star wars.” “Look, it’s here. He was a pilot. The Mike fireball.”
“No, still nothing. What are you on about. Who is Mike?” “Mike was the name of the first H-bomb. So his mission was to fly into the cloud, the explosion - take readings and stuff.”
“Dead Leader Morony, was it?”
“Well, it doesn’t exactly say what happened to him.”
Mark took a look at the passage. Apparently, in the seconds after the explosion, all the elements that have ever been were briefly created, plus some new weird ones. There was something sort of cool about that. Like being in a star. The place from which everything originates. A death star. Star Wars, again! Mark was working on a poem. He’d done some research of his own into the Oppenheimer years. Now that guy new how to talk up a project.
“Dan, read my poem.”
“Okay.”

Superb Physics

Lawrence’s calutrons, gaseous dif-
fusion, made America a fusion
factory. The piles push out the slugs.

Kistiakowsky cradling high explosive
in his lap. Shaping explosive lenses
with a dentist’s drill.

Symmetrical waves of force squeeze the sphere
plated with nickel and gold; the neutrons
go crazy. The thing bursts.

What’s leashed in me loves that mad unleashing.
The double flash, blasts of heat and hot air.
The bomb was technically sweet, superb
physics. Oppie called that test “Trinity”.

“Well, what do you think?”
“Yeah. Mint.”
“Don’t say that. God. Can’t you give me some real … critique?”
But now the teacher was approaching.
“What are you working on?” Mark silently offered up the poem for inspection.
“Yeah. Superb Physics. I’ve read quote from Oppenheimer somewhere. Yes. I like it. The idea that there’s something attractive about the bomb. It’s clever. It’s neat. Can I read it to the class? Yeah,’mad unleashing’; I love that bit.” He was quite excited. “’Spooky Action at a Distance’. Heard that one? Einstein.” What was he on about. He spoke so fast it was hard to follow the arc of his thoughts. “Einstein describing entangled particles.” Breath. “You know when quantum particles have this simultaneous link? When something happens to one, the other react immediately. Irrespective of distance. Spooky. Spooky because even if the information was somehow travelling at the speed of light it still wouldn’t have time to reach the twinned particle. It’s been proven again and again in experiments. No one knows how it happens. I love it when there’s a quote from Einstein or someone like that. Spooky. It’s science, but it’s mysterious. Ludwig Wittgenstein used to wonder if we need a new grammar with which to describe quantum phenomena. Do you know any Wittgenstein?” Although he asked a question, there was no time to answer. “Absolute genius. Shew the fly out of the fly bottle. Things on private language. Quite remarkable. The Tractatus. Ok. Ok. What about this? Quantum vacuum. Do you know about that? Two mirrors exert measurable attraction. It’s to do with the anti-matter. Amazing. It’s like a hologram. The whole thing. Right now I feel that everything is flowing through everything. I could know my whole life through a full understanding of this hand. I could know everything about the universe from this perspective, seeing everything in place. Chaotic but knowable to me because of love. Like a hologram. I glance at my wife’s ear and have to look away, everything I love about her is there in that ear. I am poised to recreate her from a fallen hair, some skin cells floating away on the breeze.” Why is he talking about his wife? “I feel aligned to her; whatever affects her affects me. If I see her smile, I’m happy without knowing the reason why. When she cries, everything starts to fall apart.”
“Sir, hold on a minute. In Biology, Miss told us love is just some chemical thing. It’s a trick to make us breed and, you know, stick together a while.”
“Biology!” He makes a noise. Dismissive. Don’t talk about biology! And he’s off. Prowling the room. Watch out though. He’s entangled. At any moment his wife might sneeze and he’ll fall into a fit. The guy is wound so tight.
“How come we have a physics teacher who thinks love is some kind of quantum effect?”
“Dunno. Same reason we have a history teacher who’s psychopathic killer. Only the best for the cream of the crop.”
“Okay. Next poem. It’s a bomb. It’s a fucking quantum love bomb. You lay this baby on the army and it entangles all their fucking particles with all of yours. You can’t kill anyone anymore, because you’re so in love.”
“They’d never fund it.”
“I know that. It’s a POEM. Not a fucking PhD application.”
“Yeah, sos.”
“Don’t mention it.”