Boardshorts and the End of Physics

"There are levels of unprepared. There's 'forgot your umbrella' unprepared, and then there's 'your boyfriend just walked through a wall and vanished' unprepared. I wasn't ready for either."

The driveway appeared like the finish line of a race I hadn't wanted to run. I pulled the Mazda in and killed the engine.

Relief washed through me, the kind that comes from completing an unpleasant task. The drive from the airport had been forty-five minutes of silence punctuated by Paul's occasional attempts at conversation, each one dying on the vine when I failed to nurture it with anything beyond monosyllables. I hadn't been deliberately rude. I just hadn't had the energy for small talk with a man I barely tolerated under the best circumstances, and these were not the best circumstances.

I popped the boot and circled around to help Paul with his luggage—an automatic gesture, the kind of courtesy that ran on muscle memory rather than genuine goodwill. His overnight-bag-that-was-definitely-a-suitcase emerged from the boot with a soft thunk, and I found myself scanning the front of the house for any sign of Luke.

Nothing. No face at the window, no door opening in greeting, no enthusiastic wave from the man who'd orchestrated this entire inconvenient morning. Just our brick house sitting there in the grey Tasmanian light, looking exactly as it had when I'd left.

Odd. Luke usually met visitors at the door. He was the social one, the greeter, the person who made guests feel welcome while I hung back and offered hospitality. His absence now felt like yet another small abdication of responsibility.

The front door presented its familiar challenge: Duke and Henri, who'd heard the car and were undoubtedly pressed against the other side, vibrating with the urgent need to escape. I'd learned this dance years ago—one hand on the door, body positioned to block the gap, voice ready with the commands that would buy precious seconds.

"Stay," I said firmly as I cracked the door open. Duke's nose appeared immediately, questing for freedom, followed by Henri's more tentative sniffing. I nudged them back with my foot, creating just enough space for Paul to slip through. "Go on, get in."

Paul entered with the cautious movements of someone navigating unfamiliar territory—which, in a sense, he was. He'd visited before, but not often enough for our home to feel like anything other than his brother's space, a place where he was guest rather than family. I followed him in, pulling the door closed behind me with a sense of finality that felt disproportionate to the simple act.

Duke was already at my leg, jumping with the enthusiasm of a dog who'd been abandoned for days rather than a couple of hours. Henri had retreated to sniff Paul's shoes, his priorities as ever oriented toward food-adjacent possibilities.

And then Luke's voice boomed from somewhere deeper in the house, cutting through the domestic chaos with a cheerfulness that felt almost aggressive in its brightness.

"Hey, Paul!"

The warmth in his tone was genuine—I could hear that much. Whatever complicated feelings existed between me and Paul, Luke loved his brother without reservation. The sound of that love, so easily expressed, so uncomplicated, made something twist in my chest.

I followed Paul into the living room, trailing behind like an afterthought.

And stopped dead.

Luke stood in the kitchen, framed by the doorway like some kind of suburban tableau, and my brain took several seconds to process what I was seeing.

Boardshorts. Bright blue boardshorts with a drawstring waist, the ones he wore around the house in summer when the heat made clothing feel like an imposition. Nothing else. No shirt, no socks, no indication that he'd done anything more strenuous than roll out of bed and wander to the kitchen in search of more coffee.

It was July. Tasmania. Winter. The kind of cold that crept into your bones if you stood still too long.

And Luke was standing there in fucking boardshorts like we were at a beach resort instead of our own home on the morning his brother had flown in for what was supposedly an emergency.

What the fuck has Luke been doing while I've been battling rush hour traffic to collect his brother from the airport?

The question screamed through my head, a silent tirade of frustration and disbelief. I'd left this morning in a state of reluctant compliance. I'd waited over an hour at an airport café, eating chocolate cake and watching strangers live their lives. I'd driven all the way home with a passenger I didn't particularly want, making conversation I didn't have the energy for. And all the while, Luke had been here—doing what, exactly? Certainly not dressing. Certainly not tidying the house, which to be fair, was already fairly clean.

The contempt that crept across my face was involuntary, a visceral reaction I couldn't have hidden even if I'd tried. It wasn't just the boardshorts, though God knows they were infuriating enough. It was what they represented—the casual disregard for the effort I'd put in, the assumption that my time and energy were freely available while his remained precious and protected.

It was, in miniature, everything that had been going wrong between us for months.

Paul's question cut through my internal fuming, giving voice to at least part of what I was feeling. "Why didn't you come to the airport?"

A reasonable question. The obvious question. The question that should have been unnecessary, given that Paul had flown all the way from Adelaide—on our money, as usual—for whatever crisis Luke had deemed important enough to summon him.

"I was preparing myself for your arrival," Luke said.

I couldn't stop the eye-roll. It was reflexive, unstoppable, my body's response to a statement so patently absurd that words felt inadequate. Preparing himself? In what universe did standing half-naked in winter constitute preparation?

Paul's chuckle echoed my thoughts, though his came wrapped in the kind of affectionate amusement that siblings cultivated for each other's quirks. "You don't look terribly prepared."

No, he fucking didn't.

"Aren't you cold?" I asked, directing the question at Luke with more edge than I'd intended. It wasn't really about temperature. It was a plea, barely disguised, for him to recognise the absurdity of the situation and do something about it.

Luke shrugged. "Meh."

Meh. One syllable, dismissing my concern—my critique, really—with the casual indifference of someone who genuinely didn't understand why I might be irritated. Or who understood and didn't care. I wasn't sure which possibility was worse.

Paul had already moved past the exchange, drifting toward the fridge with the automatic entitlement of family. He opened it and began browsing the contents with the same distracted curiosity I'd seen him display a dozen times before—not hungry, exactly, just filling space with activity.

The parallels between the brothers hit me with sudden, uncomfortable clarity. Both of them moving through this moment as if my frustration didn't exist, each absorbed in their own concerns while I stood there feeling like a ghost in my own home. Duke jumped at my leg again, and I reached down to scratch behind his ears, grateful for the distraction.

At least the dogs acknowledged my presence.

"So, what's the big emergency that couldn't wait another day?" Paul asked, still half-inside the fridge, his voice muffled by the door.

The word landed in the room like a dropped glass.

"Emergency?" I echoed, my confusion genuine and immediate. "What emergency?"

I looked at Luke, searching his face for some clue, some explanation for the disconnect I was suddenly sensing. His expression gave nothing away—or rather, it gave away the particular blankness of someone whose story was falling apart.

My gaze shifted back to Paul, who had emerged from the fridge with a handful of grapes, popping them into his mouth with the casual rhythm of someone who considered other people's food communal property.

"Aren't you the one with the... family crisis?" I pressed, trying to fit the pieces together. Paul was the one who was supposed to be in crisis. That's what Luke had said this morning. That's why I'd spent my morning playing chauffeur. That's why we'd paid for another fucking flight.

Paul's reaction was immediate and unmistakable—surprise sharpening to indignation. "Me?" The word came out around a grape, incredulous. "I don't have a family crisis. Luke called me. Said he needed me here urgently."

The floor tilted beneath my feet.

I turned back to Luke, and this time the searching quality of my gaze had hardened into something closer to demand. My features, I knew, were betraying the full scope of my reaction—the confusion curdling into suspicion, the suspicion bleeding into something darker.

"Well?" I pushed, my patience worn to threads. "What's going on, Luke?"

Because something was going on. Something I hadn't been told, hadn't been included in, hadn't been trusted with. Luke had lied to me this morning—or at least twisted the truth into a shape that served his purposes while leaving me in the dark. He'd made me believe Paul was the one in crisis, that collecting him from the airport was an act of family obligation rather than... whatever this actually was.

The realisation that I'd been manipulated—that my time, my energy, my entire morning had been extracted under false pretences—made my stomach clench with familiar fury. I detested feeling like a pawn. Detested the sensation of being moved across someone else's board according to a strategy I hadn't been shown.

Luke's mouth opened, closed, opened again. "Look, I'm sorry," he began, the words arriving with a hesitance that did nothing to inspire confidence. And then the fucker grinned. Wide and mischievous, like this was all some elaborate joke and the punchline was about to land.

My confusion deepened, anger mixing with a sudden, sharp apprehension. The grin was wrong. It didn't match the situation, didn't fit the conversation we were supposedly having. Whatever Luke was playing at, it was bigger than petty deception.

What the hell is Luke on about?

"But there is something that I really need to show both of you," Luke continued, his voice dropping into a register that was meant to convey significance but succeeded only in sounding theatrical.

Paul, still working through his stolen grapes, supplied the obvious commentary. "Well, that sounds ominous."

It did. It sounded like the kind of thing people said in films before everything went sideways.

"What is it?" I demanded, my patience evaporated entirely. Whatever game Luke was playing, I wanted it over. I wanted explanations. I wanted to understand why my morning had been sacrificed for this bizarre performance.

"Come with me," Luke said.

He turned and walked toward the hallway, gesturing for us to follow with a wave that managed to be both encouraging and infuriating. I hesitated, every instinct screaming that I didn't want whatever was about to happen. But Paul was already moving, curiosity apparently overriding the awkwardness of the situation, and I found myself following—because what choice did I have?

The hallway stretched before us, familiar and suddenly foreign. These walls I'd walked past a thousand times, these doors I'd opened and closed without thought, the carpet softer in the places where our feet fell most often—all of it felt charged with a significance I couldn't name. Luke's back moved ahead of me, boardshorts ridiculous against the winter light filtering through the windows, and I followed him toward whatever revelation he'd been building toward all morning.

The study door stood open, which was unusual enough to register. Luke's study had become a fortress over the past months—closed more often than not, a space from which I'd been increasingly excluded without explicit prohibition. I'd stopped asking what he was doing in there, stopped trying to breach the invisible barrier he'd erected around his private hours. It had seemed easier to accept the distance than to confront it.

Now the door gaped wide, and Luke stood inside, waiting for us to enter.

The room looked exactly as it always did. Desk, computer, bookshelves lined with the eclectic collection of texts Luke had accumulated over the years. The window overlooked a portion of the back garden, grey sky pressing against the glass. Nothing appeared out of place, nothing suggested that this space held whatever secret Luke had been preparing to reveal.

But what on earth would possibly warrant dragging his brother all the way down here from Broken Hill? The thought nagged at me, persistent and annoyed. Surely Luke could have done this online.

Whatever "this" was.

My gaze settled on Luke with the particular weight of boredom and exasperation that had become my default state in his presence lately. He was building to something—that much was obvious from his posture, the suppressed energy in his stance. The dramatic buildup felt unnecessary, theatrical in a way that grated against my preference for direct communication.

Just tell us, I wanted to say. Stop performing and tell us what's going on.

But Luke had never been one for directness. He was a dreamer, a dramatist, a person for whom the presentation of information was almost as important as the information itself. So I waited, arms crossed, while he reached into the pocket of his ridiculous boardshorts.

What he produced was small. Rectangular. About the size and shape of a USB stick.

"Ha, I was right! It is something on the computer."

The words escaped before I could filter them, a small triumph of intuition that felt disproportionately satisfying. I'd been silently guessing at Luke's purpose since we'd started down the hallway, and the appearance of a computer-adjacent device seemed to confirm my theory.

"What?" Luke looked at me, confusion clouding his features.

"The USB stick," I clarified, pointing at the object in his hand. "That's what all the dramatics have been about, isn't it? Something you want to show us on the computer?"

But even as I said it, I registered that Luke's grin hadn't faded. If anything, it had widened—that mischievous quality intensifying into something that bordered on triumph.

"Oh, no," Luke said, and the cockiness in his voice sent a flicker of uncertainty through my certainty. "This isn't for the computer."

I stared at him, my smugness dissolving into renewed confusion. If it wasn't for the computer, then what was it? And why were we standing in the study, of all places, if not to use the computer?

Paul voiced the question before I could. "Okay. So, what is it?"

Luke's eyes swept over both of us, making sure he had our full attention. As if he could possibly not have it at this point. Then, with the deliberate care of a showman about to pull a rabbit from a hat, he pressed a small button on top of the device.

The ball of energy that erupted from the device defied every law of physics I'd ever learned.

It burst from Luke's hand like a captive thing finally released—tight, brilliant, vibrating with a frequency I could feel in my teeth. It shot toward the wall and spread there, flattening against the surface like water thrown against glass, except water didn't glow. Water didn't hum. Water didn't transform into a field of crackling, electrical light that painted the entire room in colours I didn't have names for.

"What the..." My voice trailed into nothing, unable to complete the sentence.

The display consumed the wall. No—it replaced the wall. Where moments before there had been plaster and paint and the familiar geography of our study, now there was... this. A shimmering curtain of energy, colours swirling and colliding in patterns that seemed almost intentional, each collision sending ripples of light cascading outward before being absorbed back into the whole.

I stood frozen, my brain cycling through explanations and discarding each one as inadequate. Hologram? Projection? Some kind of elaborate hoax involving technology I didn't know existed?

None of them fit. The phenomenon before me wasn't an image—I could feel it, a pressure in the air, a charge that made the fine hairs on my arms stand at attention. It was real in a way that felt fundamentally wrong, a violation of the understood order of things.

The scientific part of my mind—the part that had spent years working in healthcare, learning the mechanics of bodies and the logic of systems—scrambled for purchase. There had to be an explanation. Everything had an explanation. This was just... something I didn't understand yet. Something Luke had discovered or built or acquired, something that operated on principles I hadn't encountered.

But the other part of my mind—the older part, the animal awareness that lived beneath conscious thought—that part knew better. That part recognised the presence of the impossible and wanted nothing more than to run.

"What is that?" Paul's voice came from somewhere beside me, equally stunned, equally lost.

"I'll show you," Luke replied, and the excitement in his voice was unmistakable now. He moved toward the display, positioning himself directly in front of the swirling lights with a confidence that suggested he'd done this before.

Paul, still processing, offered the only response available to him. "I can see. It's stunning."

Stunning wasn't the word I would have chosen. Terrifying. Impossible. Wrong. But yes, also stunning—if beauty could exist alongside fear, if wonder could cohabit with dread.

"Just follow me," Luke said, and his hand gestured toward the light.

My heart hammered against my ribs, a percussion section gone rogue. "Follow you where?" The question emerged as something between a gasp and a demand, my voice unable to decide which emotion to prioritise.

Luke didn't answer. He just smiled that maddening, mysterious smile—and stepped forward.

Into the light.

And vanished.

Not faded. Not blurred. Vanished. One moment Luke was there, solid and real and infuriatingly present, and the next moment the space he'd occupied was empty. The lights swirled where he'd been, indifferent to his passage, continuing their dance as if nothing had happened.

"What the hell!" Paul's exclamation matched the scream that was building in my own chest.

"What the hell indeed," I whispered, the words barely audible even to myself.

My gaze fixed on the spot where Luke had stood. Where my partner of ten years had been, moments ago, and now was not. The display continued its impossible beauty, colours merging and separating, utterly unchanged by the disappearance of the man who'd activated it.

Luke was gone.

The wall—our wall, in our house, in our ordinary suburban Tasmanian life—had swallowed him whole.

And I stood there, rooted to the floor of the study, understanding nothing.