Nimue's Confession — Part Two
By Lorraine Schein
The Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey is a famous place, where great scientific thinkers, such as Einstein and Gödel, have done research.
On one side of it are woods, and Merlin’s invisible tower.
They think he is a visiting physicist from overseas, but he is a permanent resident here. Sometimes he watches the scientists walking through the woods, mumbling to themselves. He laughs at their ideas on string theory and particle physics when he sits in on their lectures, knowing that the old structures of magic are the answer.
“It’s much knottier than that -- more of a Celtic knot!” he informs the distinguished lecturer on string theory. A Celtic knot of fantastic creatures, like in our day, but animal-shaped intertwined atoms.
I’m a student at Princeton, double-majoring in Women’s Studies and Physics. I visit him every day in the woods in his glass observatory behind the Institute.
Merlin feels caged there, and tries to escape once a week. But it’s suicidal--because, even if he did succeed in escaping, there would only be a few hours’ grace time before his body would start to age, then mortality would rapidly set in, and he’d be sorry his curiosity got the best of him.
He often converses with the spirit of Einstein and Oppenheimer -- especially Einstein, whose unruly white hair resembled his own, though his is longer. Much longer.
Merlin had talked a lot to Einstein when he was alive, and saw no reason to stop doing so just because he was dead. The other thing they had in common was that neither one wore socks.
“Albert,” he’d say, “Magic is unified field theory. Give it a try.”
Albert never listened to him while he was alive, but took Merlin more seriously after death. Albert now believes in what he once dismissed as “spooky action at a distance.”
Lorraine Schein is a New York writer and poet. Her work has appeared in VICE Terraform, Strange Horizons, Scientific American, and Michigan Quarterly, and in the anthologies The Unbearables, Wild Women and Tragedy Queens: Stories Inspired by Lana del Rey & Sylvia Plath. The Futurist’s Mistress, her poetry book, is available from Mayapple Press. Her newest book, The Lady Anarchist Cafe, was published by Autonomedia and available on Amazon.
Copyright © 2025 Lorraine Schein