Lone Star

by Mathilde Walter Clark

  Did you notice my scarf?

  M-hm. It’s very pretty.

  He laughed his low, conciliatory laugh. It was warm. He was warm. When he laughed, he looked a little bit Chinese. Dalai Lama. His eyes got all half-moon shaped. It was easier to be mad at him from a distance. When he sat right across from me, I couldn’t help but care. A little like with an animal, a small furry creature you could put in a drawer. I wondered what else I could tell him. I could feel them, the eons, rolling in over us. Soon afterward we stood at the bottom of the airport escalator. My cheeks already burned with salt.

  Will I see you next summer?

  I sure hope so, Sweetie Pie.

  Do you think I’ll visit you there?

  Let’s see what can be done.

  Then he stepped onto the escalator. I remained where I was, watching him become smaller. He stood facing me, waving, his arm close to his body as if nervous he might accidentally bump someone. I stayed put until he was completely out of sight. On the second floor, my itty-bitty dad glanced over his shoulder one last time, and then he was gone.

  Yet another winter lay before me. I didn’t know when I would see him again. Now that I was almost a grown-up, he was able to tell me that he was nervous about what he called his wife’s chemistry. Something was wrong with her chemistry. Situations could become awfully unpleasant sometimes. Perhaps I could remember a few such episodes? The stress she put on herself was largely to blame. Even so, he had hopes that things would improve.

  He would travel to Europe next summer, he wrote. There were different options, and he outlined them for me. A professor had invited him down to his chalet in Geneva. He also had scientist friends in Cologne. There was a man in Basel. Maybe I’d want to come along? If only the god-awful travel agent would call back about the ticket. It was like pulling teeth.

  Anyway, think about this and let me know your feelings …

  At the bottom of the page he’d added something in pencil.

  !❰ — over — ❱!

  I flipped the page over. On the back, framed in a square, he’d written something. He had just received a telephone call from England. He’d been awarded a medal. The Feenberg Medal, it was called. It would be presented to him at a conference in Oulu, Finland. For his work with many-body Physics. He closed with two exclamation points.

  I didn’t understand what the medal was for. Something about quantum physical systems that had a fundamentally endless number of particles. That’s what many-body meant. In such systems the particle activity could be so intense that it became impractical for researchers to consider every individual particle in their calculations. Apparently, my dad had developed a model that could calculate the endless number of particles in all their intense activity, and yet emerge with precise predictions. The model could be used to analyze liquid helium, nuclei, and nuclear matter, as well as the stuff found in neutron stars, whatever that was. And much more than that. He was described as a pioneer.

  We stay in a redbrick building at the university a few miles outside the city. The days are filled with lectures in an auditorium. Rows of seats that rise toward the backwall.

  During breaks the auditorium drains and the audience reemerges in a large, carpeted room. Metal carts are rolled out teeming with carafes and stacks of coffee cups and saucers. The physicists cluster in groups of two or three or four. As they hold their saucers with two fingers of one hand, they attempt to unwrap the paper from a sugar cube with their free hand. It’s an activity that requires many years training, and it could be completed in an instant if they set down their cups and used both hands to unwrap the cubes. But their heads are too deeply engaged with the mysteries of the world. The language they speak is a rare form of Volapük, understood by almost no one. Every word they utter is out of reach, not only for me but for nearly every person on the planet.

  My dad uses the breaks to speak with the Russians. I spend the breaks drawing caricatures. The Russian with the thick neck and bushy eyebrows, and the skinny man with the long bangs and the Adam’s apple. The American who always fiddles nervously with a Rubik’s cube, and the man who’s always wearing a sombrero, shorts, and sandals, who collects T-shirts with funny sayings, despite the fact they are concealed underneath a beard as long as the bandmembers’ beards in ZZ Top.

  There is another teenager, a son of a professor, and like me he sits and sketches. He uses a checkered pad. His drawings are tiny and centered in the middle of the paper. We head to the town square to draw caricatures for money. Two for one. He’s incredibly slow, and people wait for a long time, endlessly long if you ask me, while he squints over his meticulous work. I think he looks like Prince Charles.

  At night I can see the glowing lamp in the other room until well into morning. I can hear the sound of my dad’s thinking in there, his throat-clearing, the eraser on the yellow pencil, markers squeaking on overhead projection sheets. He reminds me of the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, running around in a race against time, hanging on the coattails of something large that he’s about to miss.

  Then comes the day when he’s to receive his medal. He’s going to receive his medal, and I’m turning seventeen. Sitting at the desk in his room, he writes one of the light-blue checks. Fifty dollars. I consider what I will buy with it. The bank takes a fee of fifty Danish kroner to exchange it. I prefer it when he sends me the check, because then there’s also a card to go along with it. He’s so good at selecting cards. It’s his special talent.

  I’m sitting in the rear of the auditorium, in one of the back rows, drawing. The man at the podium going on about my dad’s accomplishments speaks Volapük, and I have a unique opportunity to study his features. A side door opens, and one of the organizers enters carrying an enormous bouquet of flowers. My dad stands beside the podium, the professor leans toward the microphone. I’m about to capture him quite well. If only he would step away from the microphone. Everyone else turns and looks at me. The man at the microphone has just said my name. He’s asked me to come up to the stage to receive the flowers.

  We stand on the stage together, my dad and me. The entire auditorium claps. We’re being honored. My dad because he revolutionized quantum physics, me because I turned seventeen.

  •

  The bus is full. We look like the group from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I think. The Russians, the funny ones, the guy who always forgets to tie his shoes, the professor’s son, they’re all there—everyone but my dad. The engine idles. We need to make the train. And after the train: flights to every conceivable corner of the globe, Russia, England, Spain, Italy, USA.

  The driver announces that he can wait ten more minutes, at most, any longer and they won’t get to Helsinki in time. Jokes are tossed between the seats. The funny guys say something funny, and I readily share stories about how my dad isn’t a morning person. When he wakes up, it looks as though he’s been in a fight with his blanket, I say. I tell them how my mother would have to set out his clothes so that he remembered to wear them. I tell them about the patent-leather shoes. Everyone in the bus laughs at the thought of my dad in a tuxedo, patent-leather shoes, and bare feet. Then the driver announces that he needs to leave in one minute. Except for the engine and the sound of the Rubik’s cube, the bus falls silent. People understand the awkwardness of my position. Do I stay or get off? Then the glass doors in the building open, and I see my dad run down the stairs and cross the parking lot, hunched over, panic-stricken. Over the years, he’s replaced his old carry-on suitcase with a wheelie suitcase and a purple backpack, he hops aboard to a new round of applause, this time for making the bus, confused, apologetic, and then the doors close, the bus sets into motion and we’re off.

  ◊

  My dad running. My dad to the sound of an engine. His carry-on suitcase, bouncing, his backpack. My dad with wet hair running in the direction of the back door. Toward some kind of method of transport. Park officers, police officers, speed warnings.

  Did he know? I was beginning to notice the eon
s rolling over me.

  Kubrick’s astronaut breathing down my neck. Time passing quickly and slowly, it was like two cogwheels spinning against each other.

  The eternity between envelopes. Yet another summer zipping past. A deep contradiction. After a while, as the eternities accumulated, they became a blip.

  The astronaut who sees himself in bed as a baby, who sees himself as an old man.

  How many human lives are equal to a human life?

  Soon I will be an adult. I wrote this to him. Soon I will be an adult. I counted the summers like I counted the letters. I wrapped a ribbon around them. They were running out. Make use of them while you can. Make use of me. Soon I will be an adult. I imagined that everything would be different. I wrote: Soon everything will be different. I had a flair for the dramatic, my dad was more of a status quo man.

  My childhood summers in St. Louis, I realized, were definitively behind me. The routine at the house. What is routine if not luxurious amounts of time? Routine, I realized, was a party, a cornucopia, waking up to the daily conflagration, the hours spent underneath the tree eating homemade sandwiches. All of that was behind me now.

  I imagined: two adults on a canal tour.

  I imagined: two adults at Burger King.

  Two adults, two bashful foreigners, staring straight ahead on white plastic seats. Make use of me, I wrote …

  Soon it will happen …

  as one window closes, another opens. I’ve been invited to Iowa. One of my short stories has been selected to be reprinted in a special edition of an American literary journal. The publication will be celebrated at a festival on October 20, and they would like me to participate. I tell them I live in Denmark. They respond that as a minimum they could pay for my flight and hotel. Would I like to come earlier in the week since I was traveling so far? The students would benefit greatly from your presence at the festival …

  Funnily enough, the story is one that I translated myself, with my dad, when I was at the University of Iowa in 2006, a project that came about by chance.

  The hotel I was staying at was on the university’s campus. Thirty-five writers from all around the globe were staying there. You’d almost think it was an experiment, the rooms were on both sides of a long hallway. Sometimes the fire alarm would go off during the night, a drill, but we didn’t know that. Writers from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Mexico, and Bangladesh poured from their rooms in their pajamas. Had they installed a hidden camera at the end of the hallway? I imagined so. I imagined someone watching us. If there really was a fire, what would they carry out with them, these writers? It was disappointing that no one tried to save their manuscript. The Kyrgyzstani woman from the room next to mine emerged each time with her souvenirs, a cowboy hat and a wicker apple basket, the elderly gentleman from Burma brought his rice cooker, and I carried a banana in both pockets of my raincoat. I got so hungry when we sat on the stairs and waited.

  But it was no experiment, it was reality. The objective was that, during the course of an entire fall semester, we were to interact with the students at the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop, including making our texts available for a small group who was especially interested in translation. I gave them a new story, no one knew Danish, of course, so I made the first rough pass myself, and the agreement was that we would work together from there. There was a deadline; I was to read the story to an audience in the city’s bookstore, Prairie Lights, and it would also be broadcast on live radio. Something went wrong in communications with the translators and me, some emails didn’t arrive, and I ended up writing my dad to ask if he would help. He was happy to. When he sent me the document back, he’d added words and sentences that hadn’t been in the original. It is unusual for a translator to do this, so I asked him about it, and he said: I got carried away.

  What developed was a project that stretched across many weeks. I enjoyed it. It was the first time he tried to access something in Danish. He’d set sail in an oatmeal packet and met me out on the vast ocean. Every translator will recognize the work. Emails back and forth in which we discussed the weight between individual words, their sound and meaning. Picking at individual sentences, recreating the original’s tone in a new language. Should we use gruff or brusque to describe the fishmonger’s manner? The origin of brusque is interesting, he wrote. It’s from the Latin brucus, meaning a butcher’s broom made out of a plant with bristly twigs.

  Dadversion_1 to Dadversion_8.

  After I’d read the story in the bookstore, the editor of a literary journal requested permission to publish it. At the bottom were the words: Translated from the Danish by John W. Clark and the author. It’s this work they would like to reprint now.

  •

  My dad is excited about the prospect of this open window. Your trip to Iowa presents us with a fine opportunity to get together! he writes. He explains that his wife, in an attempt to speed up the process of selling the house, is coming to St. Louis for six weeks, and she’s returning to Belgium right on October 20. The weather tends to be good at that time of the year, he writes, he can drive up to Iowa City in the M3.

  How fortunate.

  I picture him driving her to the airport in silence. Then home to pack the wheelie suitcase that has replaced the carry-on suitcase, and whiz northward in his silver-colored BMW. If her flight is delayed, he’ll be delayed. If her flight is cancelled, his visit will be cancelled.

  I don’t know which I prefer. The times when he covered up or downplayed or even pretended as if these difficulties didn’t exist, the necessity of concealing our connection—or now, when he lets them dry in the wind.

  We meet behind the stage. Shoes off; if he wore a tie, he’d loosen it.

  Doesn’t matter. In September I receive an email from the arrangers letting me know that they couldn’t raise enough funds for my ticket. The window closes.

  ◊

  Last year in Belgium, once even during dinner, his wife said: Your father always lies. In reality he’s a bad liar. Asked directly, he’s incapable of sustaining even the simplest fib. But I understood what she meant. She meant something along the lines of exactly what he’d tried to organize with me. The pattern is familiar. The attempt to orchestrate reality so that his wife doesn’t get upset. And the reality that reveals itself to be bigger and more intractable than anticipated, reality that follows its own narrative course. He ought to know, he who has spent large chunks of his life studying the most extreme examples of intractability. Quantum systems, neural networks, chaos. About climate change he once said, for example, it’s such a complicated system that no one—not even those who say they do—really know what’s causing it.

  But if the factors that affect climate are too complex to understand, what then is a human being? And when this human being is brought together with human beings in all their unpredictability?

  ◊

  I’ve moved away from home, rented a room on Istedgade in an apartment without a shower. I’m saving money to travel. I have a boyfriend who’s also saving money. We don’t want to schlep around with backpacks on the heels of others schlepping around with backpacks, we want to hunker down somewhere, hopefully far away. With closed eyes and a finger in an atlas, we settled on Buenos Aires. I have three jobs. I start at Daells Varehus at 6:00 am for ISS Cleaning Service. I mop floors in the cafeteria. My boss at Daells Varehus, Hans from hardware, drinks his morning coffee as he watches me push the mop between chairs. At quarter past nine, I take the elevator down to the basement, clock in as a cashier, and walk up to hardware to put price stickers on artificial flowers and sell soft serve ice cream. At 6:00 pm I clock out and bike out to a factory on Amager to mop more floors. I’m done at 11:30. After a year, my biceps are enormous, and I have enough money to travel to South America.

  The boyfriend is tall and gangly, with a large, rather reddish nose. I suggest that, since we’re flying so far anyway, we might as well take a little detour to my dad’s place. When you look at a globe, it’s obvious that St. Louis is not
on the way to Buenos Aires, from Copenhagen the two cities form separate points of a triangle. But the boyfriend isn’t finicky. It’s where your family is, he says.

  •

  Even before I show up things are complicated. In a letter my dad skirts around the topic. Staying with them is not a good idea. It would be best if I made a surprise visit.

  I like the idea of being a surprise. I arrange with Pranoat and Uncle Kip to stay with them. They’re also the ones to pick us up at the airport. My dad doesn’t know the date. Nor does he think to ask.

  For many months I’ve imagined my sister’s face when she opens the door. Pranoat drives us to the house and drops us off. We walk around to the back door and ring the bell. Just as I’d hoped, she opens. My sister, Carissa. She stands there in her underwear and T-shirt and a towel wrapped around her head like a turban. She doesn’t see me. I only manage to get a glimpse of her before she disappears into the kitchen, as if opening the door had been nothing more than an irritation, a temporary disruption of what she was doing. I follow her. She has the same thin body as I, but longer, and she still has that strange flailing way of walking on her tiptoes, her feet pointing outward. I can see the muscles work in her calves. She sits down on the tall barstool and returns to slurping up the Corn Flakes she’d been eating, and I sit down on the chair beside her without saying a word. They’ve remodeled the kitchen.

  Is that you? she says.

  It is me, I say.

  I had no idea you were coming.

  It’s a surprise, I say.

  Times passes. It’s been two and a half years since my last visit. We’re in her room. Except for Carissa, no one knows I’m here. I feel like a Trojan horse; it’s an intoxicating sensation, the surprise will work itself out of the house, not in. After some time, we go down to find her mother. My sister wants to talk her into driving us to The Loop, the area with all the secondhand shops and the cozy cafes. We go down the stairs, her mother stands in the front kitchen and watches us come into sight, first my sister, then me with the boyfriend right behind.