Quantum Diaper Punks – Stuart Buck

October 10, 2021

“nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine;
nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!
lo! thy dread empire, chaos! is restored;
light dies before thy uncreating word:
thy hand, great anarch! lets the curtain fall;
and universal darkness buries all.”

— alexander pope, the dunciad

 

i met her at a melt banana concert. a japanese band that played cartoon punk rock with incredible precision and speed. she had schrodingers equation cut into her inner thigh. i could see it because all she was wearing was a tiny diaper. this would be weird, but its not. not any more. i guess it was at the time but… things have changed. i asked her what it meant. she said ‘nothing exists like we think it does’. i asked her why she was wearing a diaper. she said ‘in case i shit myself’.

she was beautiful. neon pink hair. wild like a dervish in the middle of the crowd. looked about nineteen. most people were staring at her tits. i have never seen anyone so comfortable within themselves. under the strobe light it looked like she was dancing in two separate places. she was the double slit experiment – an electron shot through the night. the song stopped. the air was wet.  she turned to me with wide, blue eyes. she was crying. 

can you believe how beautiful this is?

after the encore we went back to her house. she lived in a basement underneath a noodle shop. her house smelt like soy sauce and dust. we lay on her bed and she told me that when you shine white light, which is a continuous spectrum, into a monotonic gas, you get back precise line spectra, which is a phenomena that can only be explained by quantum mechanics. my ears were ringing from the concert still but i nodded and pretended to understand. she told me that quantum mechanics was still theoretical but that it predicted the most extraordinary things with staggering accuracy. i asked her why that mattered and she just laughed. we talked about what things were made of. she squeezed my balls and told me that 1.5 million mites live in my body. that those mites were made of the same thing that black holes were made of. 

doesn’t the scale of everything just make your skin tingle?

i lay back on the bed and she took my pants off. she left the room momentarily and came back with a floral suitcase. she put it on the floor and clicked it open. inside were diapers, pacifiers and a baby blue teddy bear. she put the pacifier in her mouth and slipped one in mine. then she lifted my legs and diapered me, fastening the cloth with a safety pin. she kissed my stomach. when she was done, we lay on the bed together and looked up at her ceiling. she had covered it in glow in the dark stars. we held hands and gave each planet a stupid name. we fell asleep. i dreamed of being on a cruise ship. of searching for a gospel choir. i knelt at a man’s feet and ate christ’s flesh. i woke up crying, not the wetness of distress but the deep, guttural moans of someone who was learning how much of his life he had wasted.

∞

i wore a diaper from then on. when you learn how things work, how they really work, you stop caring about almost everything else. quantum physics makes you want to find god. because its more plausible that someone created a finite something, than the idea that everything is infinite, that everything that can happen will eventually happen. if life is just a specific arrangement of atoms then in an infinite universe that particular arrangement will be almost identically replicated an almost infinite number of times.. that’s what infinity is. and if that’s the case, then why the hell should i bother taking my pants down when i need to go pee?

we started handing out fliers at concerts. called ourselves the quantum diaper punks. my abiding memory of that time is hearing the music pouring out from the clubs and not once wishing i was inside. eve told me she had been waiting for someone like me. someone she could rely on. i’ve never experienced feelings like the ones i felt when we were together. someone to share this incredible life with. we took amphetamines and rested our foreheads together. we lay in the middle of the road and cried because we were alive. the city comes alive at night. cliche but true. eve showed me the most beautiful office blocks. each light was a person working through the darkness. probably alone. burning out under the futile resistance of tungsten filaments. nothing is really where it is meant to be. it just might be there. eve stood on the edge of a bridge. told me she was going to jump. would i jump too? i told her i would do it on my own if she told me to. at that point, i would have. she got down and took off her wet diaper. threw it on the ground with a wet thump. danced naked in the middle of the street. some of this is fabricated. it makes the guilt easier to digest. 

∞

by the end of the first week we had three recruits. the punks were expanding just like the universe. two of them knew eve from before we met. they fucked her while i watched. i should have been jealous. but it turned me on to see them defile her. and she always came back to me at night. crawled into bed next to me and ask me how i felt, knowing that she had other guys cum inside her. i told her the truth. i told her that, for the first time ever, i knew she loved me. i knew i was someones first choice. i would dig my fingers into her arm until the blood burst beneath her skin. she wanted me to mark her. to brand her. 

we hung out in a burnt out warehouse on the edge of town. if that sounds fantastical, go to the edge of your town. they are everywhere. the viscera of failed capitalism. eve taught us about the cosmological constant. about black holes and entropy. sweetest entropy. everything ends in the purest way. complete chaos. the second law of thermodynamics states that as time moves forward the net entropy of any isolated or closed system will always increase. disorder is always waiting. eve told us that killing was just a way to speed up entropy. 

by the end of the second week we had fifteen people. all young, all lost and fucked up. junkies mostly. looking for answers in all the wrong places. eve bought us texas instrument calculators and flick knives 

∞

we found him by a dumpster. so cliche. but that’s where they hang out. waiting for food. waiting to make their peace with god. we promised him a warm meal and a comfortable bed. these fuckers are desperate. its cold outside. hunger does fucked up things to your brain. go one day without food. then tell me you cant understand these people. on the way to the warehouse he told me his wife had left him. had cheated on him with one of her friends husbands. four lives ruined because of one wet dick. what a fucking waste. 

eve was waiting with a couple of the stronger recruits. we tied him to a chair and started beating him. tears were running down his face. he looked betrayed. it turned us all on. the junkies were screaming with joy. eve asked the old beggar questions while she slapped his face. 

if you throw a book into a black hole, is the information contained in that book lost forever? 

he was scared now. properly scared. the kind of vacant look in his eyes that you saw on animals in the pound. no future. 

what if no one had ever read the book. does it even exist? 

in the light from the fire i could see him searching for an answer. for something to say to make this stop. maybe we would feed him if he could just answer. i laughed. this stupid cunt didn’t know. he didn’t understand chaos like we did. 

she took a thin blade from her back pocket and cut through the guys arm. he passed out again and again as we stripped skin from his body. entropy. everything becomes disorder. some of the recruits were kissing. touching each other with one hand while the other hacked at the old mans face and arms. he was a complete fucking mess. a supernova about to burn out and become something none of us will ever understand until it’s too late. we pulled his guts out with our bare hands and tied them round his throat like a noose. if he had been alive before we hung him from his own intestines, he was dead soon after. the world seemed to ejaculate around us. i wondered how many billions of atoms were dripping from the old man onto the ground as we lay, ecstatic and naked, glistening with blood. eve took my hand in hers and smiled. i could see the mites crawling over her skin. i could see each proton and neutron making their cosmic decision then and there. everything led to this moment. she told me in an infinite universe, somewhere i was god. i believed her.