The Universe in Miniature in Miniature

by Patrick Somerville

  I did what I could but there was no chance—none. He was just on the edge of the wet pail of mush already. He stayed conscious.

  He was screaming for a long time, and do you know what? Doctors stay very professional in these situations.

  But I could feel that he was dying—you get a sense about that, you feel the energy in the air.

  We put him under and I tried. He didn’t make it.

  Stabbed by a crazy man.

  Corinne was justifiably confused at finding a goat living at my house, and when she noted this out loud, I remember saying, “I’m also confused by it,” and I immediately then drove the goat back south, to where I’d found it, and left it walking around the burned husk of the farm house. We broke up. A few months later I moved to Louisville and started school. When I was done with it all, I came back to Chicago.

  Before that, I had more pleasant stops at Alex’s shop, leaning against his counter, watching television with him. Sometimes Matilda would come in and not talk to me, which was fine, because I no longer loved her. Joseph even returned on leave before I left town. He was working at the store, and rung me up when I bought paper towels. Who knows if he later died?

  Even Windy City Liquors was impermanent. The last time I saw Alex was in February, during a week-long below-zero snap. It was noon and it was dark already, and I trudged through the snow, down the street, for soup. Out front, I noticed three black Jaguars lined up in a row, all with their hazards on. And inside, I found their owners. Five men, all of them tall, all of them in long dark overcoats, all of them standing in front of the counter, talking to Alex in what I think was Russian, and there was Alex, looking amazingly small, hands on his countertop, listening, nodding his head, complacent and meek, and I thought to myself: this is what the mafia looks like. When it’s mad at you. He didn’t acknowledge me when I rang up my can of Campbell’s, but I thought of it as him doing something good for me, not letting me be involved at all. All the men stepped aside for me, and I paid, and then I was outside again, jogging back to my building. The next afternoon, there was an Eastern European man I’d never seen before working behind the counter, and a few days later he was there again, and finally I introduced myself and he nodded and said that he’d bought the store from Alex.

  “He wanted to spend more time with his family,” he said. “He was overworked.”

  I have wondered what one does to transplant an entire family from one country to another—from a country where a war is going on to the other country fighting the war—and what one then does to get a business, and what one does to make ends meet in the process. It can’t be easy.

  “Do you see him?” I asked the man.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you know him? Do you know Alex?”

  “Me?” he said. “No. No, I don’t know.”

  “Well if you do ever see him,” I said. “Tell him I say hello. All right?”

  “Of course, my friend.”

  I was back at home before I realized this man didn’t know who I was.

  The Mother

  Here was a day. Here was a day I went down and tried to find my son and tried to bring him home. Here is what I find out earlier that morning. I find out Jeremy did not almost quit school last week like he told me, but that he quit three months back, from before I even started seeing Michael and before the semester began. Can you believe that? I find this out because I call into the UIC bursar and they tell me. So first thing I wonder back aloud to the lady is where is all the tuition, but she don’t know, and I’m mad as hell about it all morning, but then the call comes from the hospital and now it’s something else and I’m not thinking about any of that. I just switched gears. That’s what I’m thinking now. They’ve got Jeremy in the ER there at Resurrection and not only that but he’s saying he needs me and that he’s in trouble. They’re saying he’s raving and this don’t seem like him but something low down in me believes it nonetheless and it sees him there, lying on a bad old hospital cot, yelling for his mama. This is what you fear.

  “Why? What happened?” I ask them on the phone, even though I’d give anything to not know the answer, but I got to, I’m wondering if it’s the same again or what, and the woman says, “He’s been stabbed, ma’am,” nothing about no dope.

  He’s been stabbed, ma’am—sounds like the movies, maybe a cowboy movie, the way they says it. Of course it ain’t really, though, and here I am just all in shock, really it’s worse than it could have been, and I say something to Jesus and I get my things and I tell Kevin I gotta leave, whether he likes it or not, because my boy is downtown and in trouble. He sees me crying but I say it angry, too. I’m half-expecting him to fire me on the spot because really he ain’t no superior, he’s some baby barely older than Jeremy, my boy who’s lying down there stabbed (I’m still not believing it at this moment), and here I am fifty-five years old, he don’t know how to deal with that, I’ve even been at this CVS longer than him, and he can’t stand how I don’t listen when he turns into the Big Man. You can see that glaze come over his eyes that way all men take up the mantle. I turn off when I see it in Kevin because I’m not listening to no one half my age for too long. So now I come at him angry because I don’t want him to even start. We’re at the registers. Right at the counter in front of us there’s some yuppie-ass white girl waiting to buy gum, watching us like we both out of a movie scene.

  But Kevin don’t turn to her to check her out. Kevin says to me, “All right, Dee,” and he says it’s okay for me to go and he puts his hand on my shoulder and he says he’ll call in Getty or Felicia and he says to hurry up and don’t worry about coming back for the rest of the shift, it’s fine. I don’t say thank you because why would I? I get out of there. Still, it’s better than it could have been, and now I’ll remember about Kevin.

  I go all the way down there in a cab and it’s a half-hour before I’m standing there, telling them who I am and who I need to see. I think somewhere in there I tried to call Michael but I couldn’t get him. I tried to get my sister but I couldn’t get her, either. The world’s just coming apart. There’s a child standing on the sidewalk out front when we pull up and he’s playing with a green umbrella. It’s not raining. Here’s where things turn murky. Inside they’re saying it’s too late and that my baby’s gone. They had him under but he’s gone, now. Some doctor’s here and he’s tellin’ me. I do hear it, mind you. The words come in and they make sense and a part of me understands.

  But I won’t even get into the pain—that’s far too much to say. I got years to go to think about that. Just listen to this, it’s on the side, just somethin’ I kept thinking on the day my son died: look at yourself next time you hear some news that’s so crazy you decide you ain’t gonna take it. Look at yourself next time someone dies. You’ll see.

  The Wildlife Biologist

  The summer after my sophomore year of high school, my mother and I took a trip to Chicago to visit my brother James and to give my father time to move out of the house. I knew what was happening; she hadn’t tricked me into going on vacation to give him time to pack up his boxes with whatever sad items he thought he might need in his sad apartment on the other side of town. Everything was in the open. We talked about it, and him, during the drive, and I had visions of my father carefully folding his underwear before placing each pair into a cardboard suitcase—soon he would be off on his life as a hobo, immersed in a new and diluted existence. My mother let me drive to and from Chicago with just my temps, even into the city. Even on the Dan Ryan.

  We lived in a town in southern Illinois called Farrow. Farrow was fifteen miles east of the Mississippi; the trip was just under three hours, and here is what I learned: My father was leaving, my mother said, because she had asked him to go. She had asked him to go, she said, because somewhere along the line, ten or fifteen years into the marriage, they had fallen out of love.

  “It’s like a bath you’ve been in too long,” she said. “Eventually you look around and say, ‘This
is absolutely not pleasurable.’” She shrugged. “So shouldn’t I get out? Tell me, Courtney. Shouldn’t my happiness be what matters? To myself?”

  Clearly this conversation was for her own benefit; I held onto the steering wheel and stared straight ahead. My mother and I did not talk about things like this. But I listened. And as she talked, I realized I had always wanted to have these kinds of conversations with her, to get a sense of the back and forth of her life, to define and re-define happiness, weigh the matters of modern pain in our private ways, but that being her daughter had always felt like being, in a way, the family pet. Pleasant yet inconsequential, and somebody who could not possibly interfere.

  They had agreed to divorce once my brother and I were moved out of the house, but my mother—and I only realized this years later, well after she was gone—was prone to cheap revelation, and had decided that one of the two of us out of the house was enough, and that she couldn’t wait another two years.

  She decided it, she said, watching the very last patch of snow disappear from the front yard over the course of an afternoon. She explained that it was a metaphor about time and loss. I thought it was cheesy.

  “He understands. I’ve warned him for a decade and he’s had his opportunities. He prefers Scotch and silence. It’s not as though this is a surprise,” she said. “It’s a rescheduled event.”

  “Not for me,” I said. “Not for James.”

  “That sounds like the beginning of self-pity, young lady.”

  “Well,” I said. “Yeah.”

  “I won’t have it.”

  “I’m the one who has it.”

  “If you could see it from my point of view,” she said, and I could hear her blowing air out from her pursed lips, trying and failing to whistle. “Oh my good lord, Courtney.”

  I did want her to try harder, but not for any good reason.

  Summer passed quickly. James decided not to come home, and instead stayed in Chicago, doing an “internship,” which I knew actually meant losing his virginity to a Jewish girl named Samantha who he’d met in his summer dorm. He whispered the news to me, on the phone, just as we were saying goodbye.

  “She and I,” he said. “We’ve done it.”

  I waited.

  “You had sex?”

  “Yeah.”

  I didn’t know what to say, as this wasn’t open territory for my brother and me, either.

  Finally, I just said, “Congratulations.”

  Dad did have a pathetic apartment on the other side of town. I had only imagined it that day in the car, but it turned out to be real. It had walls with fake-wood paneling, vertical slats of alternating darkness, one of them bowed and bubbled. He never bothered to fix it. The carpet was indoor/outdoor, and I imagined that if I tripped on my way to the kitchen I would skin my knees. There was usually rotten fruit in a plastic bowl in the kitchen—this summoned images of him at the grocery store, pondering a pile of ripe bananas—and sometimes, when I would come over, I would find three or four pizza boxes stacked outside his door. He had almost no furniture. However, he had a huge television. It loomed, dark and black, alone with the couch in the living room, always tuned to ESPN, muted.

  Dad found a new girlfriend quickly. I wasn’t mad about it. Was I supposed to be? I don’t think I cared. I never cared. Her name was Trish, and she worked at the pet store in the mall. I hardly saw her, but when I did, she was nice, and she asked me about what books I liked to read. I told her that I only ever read Deliverance, over and over again, and she smiled and said, “Oh, nice. Is that with Holden Cauliflower?”

  “It’s for the best, this divorce,” Dad said one July evening at dinner. We were alone. He was contemplative—I knew because he had brought out his Jim Croce albums and shown them to me.

  “I guess so.”

  “Imagine if you had to internalize that conflict. Imagine if that was built entirely into your brain.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “This could have stuck with you for the rest of your life,” he said, staring off toward his bubbled wall in profound mode. Was he drunk? “It could have led to permanence. This way, our problems are out in the open a little earlier, which means you don’t have to get stuck with them yourself. We communicate and relieve ourselves of burdens.”

  “Are you a psychologist?”

  “We’re both happier in our new and improved lives,” he continued. “That’s what’s central here. In fact, your mother and I have agreed on this point. Often. Things are cordial between us now. We email.”

  “I’m not having problems,” I told him. “We don’t have to always talk about it. I’m not going to blow myself up.”

  “How is your mother?”

  “She knits.”

  “Knits?” he said, and his eyes went wide with wonderment. “Truly?”

  I started to run, I don’t know why. I wasn’t an athlete, but there was something about the warm nights, running down mile-long abandoned streets after the first pain had come and gone and you’d settled into something steady. I thought about it like a long closed tunnel, like there was a roof over me and walls on both sides—a roof of invisible energy, like the walls of prison cells in science fiction movies—and even if it rained the rain didn’t touch me, it just spread out around me as I went. I grew, and one day Dad looked at me angrily and said, “You’re taller than me, aren’t you?”

  I was a cashier at the grocery store, and I was too fast. I used to whip items down the metal runway at a pace that made the bagboys hate me. I was as fast as the laser that read the bar code. Maybe faster. Once, my manager walked by and raised her eyebrows, then nodded with great respect at the work I was doing. In her eyes I could see myself, ten years later, having won all the cashier awards, moving up into the ranks of power-teller elite. I went faster.

  I’ve always had this one problem, with every task in life, and I still have it today, even though I’m far away from that place and even though I’m no longer the same person—but for this. I did not know how to say it then, as I was much, much too young. Here is how I think of it now: I’m stuck in time, and we all are, and it does not matter how much work we do. We can’t get out, either way.

  Mr. Carpenter had been teaching at my high school for three years when I got into his AP Bio class. Every girl wanted to get into Mr. Carpenter’s AP Bio class. Every boy, too. He obviously got high. He was hot. He was funny. He rode his bike to work. He talked like us, he felt like he came from the same place we did. He was usually tan in September because he guided kayak trips in Idaho over the summer. In his class you dissected a fetal pig and learned about electrophoresis. He seemed aware of the existence of the internet. He called us his little lemmings whenever we asked about grades.

  On the first day of class, I remember sitting down in his room with everyone else, the tension high as we waited for him to come in from the hall, where he’d greeted us one by one. He was happy because it was the fall. He told us this after the bell rang, and after we made our introductions.

  “We think of it as a time of death,” he said, pacing in front of his blackboard. He looked up with a sober face. “You English nerds. Tell me what snow means in a poem.”

  “Death,” said a stoner kid in the front, stupidly. Everyone laughed.

  “No, no,” said Mr. Carpenter, smiling along now. “Jeremy’s exactly right,” he said, pointing, showing us that he was already remembering names. He was a virtuoso teacher and he cared, very deeply, about knowing us personally.

  “And there is a certain beauty to that. But in here, snow is not death. Snow is a product of a process that itself is a product of another process. There’s a web of meaning that’s different than the web of meaning you find in literature, or even the meaning we give to ideas, to events. There is no right and wrong in nature. Only physical phenomenon. Life changes its habits because of it. The leaves falling from a tree is not death. A squirrel hiding itself away is not death. It’s all life.”

  “Oh my God,” Holly,
my lab partner, muttered to me. “I just creamed my jeans.”

  “Now,” continued Mr. Carpenter. “Since this is the first day, we have to have a big conversation. A meta conversation. Understand?”

  “No,” said that same stoner kid, Jeremy. He didn’t get as many laughs as he had. What he was only now just understanding was that you couldn’t use the same teacher-eroding material on Mr. Carpenter. We didn’t want to pick away at him, piece by piece, until he was nothing more than a pile of dust. We all wanted him to survive.

  “It means above,” said Mr. Carpenter, ignoring him. “It means taking a step back and thinking about the big picture. Okay?” I found myself nodding along with him. He noticed me and picked up on my enthusiasm. “So here’s the challenge for you today. I know we have a big test at the end of the year, and I know you all want to do well on that. And we will. I promise. You’ll all know enough to get your fives and get your credits at your dream colleges. But for today, forget about that. Here’s the challenge: I want you to huddle up with your lab partners, no books, take twenty minutes, and come up with the definition of life.”

  I noticed that he said “the” and not “a,” which was different than what most of the young teachers implied about truth and definitions, no matter what class. They liked to say “voices” and “readings” and “models” and “the situation of the observer.” I wondered, then, what would happen if you planted Mr. Carpenter down in the middle of fifth period Theory of Knowledge. I imagined him punching Dr. Masterson right in the face.

  We all sat quietly, waiting for more from him. It didn’t come.

  He gathered up his notebooks and went and sat at his desk. I could see that he was reading a magazine. It had a mountain climber on the cover.

  “Do you know?” Holly asked me.

  “The definition?”

  “Yeah.”