by Julie Wu
By the time I arrived in Rapid City, the suit was a mess. I bought a clothes brush and brushed it off as well as I could before walking into Beck’s office.
Professor Krauss looked at me over Beck’s desk. He wore round glasses that made him look like an eighteenth-century philosopher. All around him were pictures of Professor Beck—Beck holding up a fish, Beck at the helm of a ship, Beck holding a baby. I thought it odd that Krauss would set up camp in someone else’s office when his own office was just down the hall.
“What you say sounds impressive,” Krauss said, his voice thin and gravelly, his eyes roving my suit. “But you’ll need to submit an application and go through the formal process like everyone else.”
“But Professor Beck told me—”
“Professor Beck is having a lovely time eating crayfish and drinking schnapps. While he enjoys himself, I’m chairman.”
I kept quiet, hearing his sharp tone. He looked up at me, his face serious, humorless. No doubt he thought Beck a clown and resented his position.
“Mrs. Larsson will show you an application,” he said.
Mrs. Larsson glanced at me as I came out of Beck’s office, my face hot. “Don’t worry,” she whispered, putting a red-lacquered finger to her lips. “His bark is worse than his bite.” She handed me an application. “And this came today,” she said with a smile. She handed me a blue airmail envelope that smelled of her perfume. She turned her back to me and resumed licking envelopes. She obviously had no interest in me at all. I had just been vulnerable, had imagined things.
I tore the letter open.
Dear Saburo,
It’s very boring in the hospital. I’m in a room by myself so the other patients won’t bother me. The food tastes terrible, but it’s enough, at least, and I am regaining some of my weight. They come by three times a day to give me my medication, and once a day they record my weight.
I sighed, relieved and amazed. I had made one—albeit one very expensive—phone call. I had spoken out against my mother more strongly than I ever had. And now Yoshiko was in the hospital, getting what she needed.
I miss Kai-ming terribly. Your parents have not brought him by, nor have they come by themselves. Only my family and my friends come, bearing me delicious treats that I have no appetite to eat.
Your mother was so angry with me after your phone call. She said she told me not to tell you I was sick. Then she didn’t say anything to me at all or even look at me until I left for the hospital. It was as though I was never there. I suppose there will be no more holding hands at the market. I think that she thought we were best friends and that I deceived her. I’m very sorry about that.
“Would you like to register now?” Mrs. Larsson said brightly.
“What?”
“You’ll need to register to attend classes on Monday. You missed registration, but I’m sure they’d help you at the registrar’s office. And—” She handed me a little slip of paper.
“And what?” I took the slip of paper.
“Rick’s Laundry. He’s the best.” She winked.
I registered for fall semester, paying in cash. And I had more to worry about than Yoshiko, Kai-ming, and my mother. Because after registration and all I had spent on the car, the train tickets to and from Churchill, my summer’s living expenses in Ann Arbor, and Rick’s Laundry, I had $204.53 left for the entire year.
30
WHILE I HAD GROWN up considering eggs a delicacy, eggs were actually the cheapest source of protein I could find in America. And having learned from my childhood encounter with malnutrition, I dutifully supplemented my eggs with whatever odd vegetables I could afford at the supermarket. There would be no Toru here to rescue me.
I flipped an egg, but the protein stuck to the dented pan and the yolk spilled open. I tried to scrape the mess off the pan with the spatula, but it didn’t come off and the egg looked even worse. I mixed it all up in the pan, hoping to make it into an omelet.
“Look at this!” My roommate held up the morning’s newspaper, its letters smeared under his sweaty fingers: SOVIETS FIRE SATELLITE INTO SPACE!
“A satellite?” I stared at the grainy image of a metal sphere trailed by four spikes.
It wasn’t possible. Everything I’d read had agreed with Hong’s assessment, that the Russians were bluffing. Eighty kilograms to the Americans’ projected one and a half, an altitude twice as high. Impossible.
Yet there it was.
I shut off the stove and scraped the partially burned mess of egg onto my bowl of rice. “I don’t believe it,” I said. “Those guys can say anything they want. The picture could be a fake.”
“No, no! People have seen it!” my roommate said. “They’re tracking the radio transmissions.” He laughed. “Except the frequency is different from what everyone expected. Tricky Russians.”
I read the paper. It was true. The satellite was orbiting.
I walked to the window and looked at the sky, hung with cumulocirrus clouds. Above them, roving atoms tumbled in the wake of a beeping Russian sphere, their bonds jolted for the first time by this thing so weirdly smooth, so symmetrical, so man-made. Space was no longer pure, and that thought filled me with excitement, wistfulness, and fear.
TWO DAYS LATER I got a message from Mrs. Larsson saying that Dr. Krauss wished to speak to me.
As I walked by Mrs. Larsson’s desk, she handed me a letter from Yoshiko:
Your sisters dropped off Kai-ming in my hospital room, saying they needed a break from caring for him.
He cried and cried. He clung to me but his grip was so weak.
He looks so thin. I told them they must take him to Toru. But what can I do if they do not?
Krauss’s door was closed.
“He’ll just be a few minutes.” Mrs. Larsson smiled and turned up the volume on her radio, her eyes wide. “Listen,” she said.
. . . Soviets’ launching of a one-hundred-eighty-four-pound satellite two hundred miles above the earth, traveling eighteen thousand miles per hour . . . This does not, according to the president, in any way mean that Soviet technology is superior to the Americans’, and there is no cause for concern . . .
“Scary, isn’t it?” she said. She pointed straight up. “They’re up there.”
“It is scary,” I said, though at the moment I was more worried about my wife’s and my son’s health than whether the Soviets were on the path to world domination. “Have you heard from Professor Beck?”
“Oh yes! He sent me this.” She held up a jar. “Lingonberry jam. Would you like some?”
“No, thank you,” I said.
“You’re just being polite. You look hungry.” She spread some jam on a cracker and handed it to me. “Mommies can tell.”
I bit into it, and it was so sweet I almost gagged. A chunk of jam fell out of the corner of my mouth and fell onto my jacket sleeve.
“Oh no,” I said. “Not again.”
“Oh!” With a look of alarm, Mrs. Larsson leaped up and wiped the jam off my sleeve with a paper towel.
“How many children do you have?” I asked.
She put up two fingers. “Twelve and nine. They’re with Grandma. Spoils ’em to death.” She winked.
“They’re lucky,” I said.
Dr. Krauss’s door opened. He frowned at me as Mrs. Larsson and I brushed the crumbs off my suit. Mrs. Larsson quickly switched off her radio, returned the carriage on her typewriter, and set to work typing.
Dr. Krauss let me into his office and sat behind his desk. I stood awkwardly looking down at him, fingering the sticky spot on my sleeve. There was a chair next to me, but he didn’t invite me to sit in it. “One of the teaching fellows has had to leave suddenly,” he said. “In light of recent events—with the launching of Sputnik—your experience with rocketry and atmospheric physics gives you an advantage over the other candidates.”
I sat in the chair, relieved.
“However,” he said, “I was reviewing your résumé and noticed that you attended a
technical institute. Was this a four-year college?”
“Yes, it was,” I said, though I declined to mention that I had not attended high school first. “College is college,” I remembered Yoshiko saying. Though it wasn’t really true.
“Did you obtain the equivalent of an American bachelor’s degree?”
This again! He was just like Wei-ta. My stomach clenched, but I stayed quiet for a moment, calming myself down.
“It was not called a bachelor’s degree,” I said. “But since I’m doing well in the master’s program, it must be equivalent.” I crossed my arms, and I could feel my heart beating. I made myself smile. If Krauss’s bark truly was worse than his bite, as Mrs. Larsson said, I had to be careful not to overreact.
“True,” he said. “Though the terms of the fellowship state that the recipient must have a bachelor’s degree.” He rested his fingertips against one another and looked up at me.
I could not believe this was the end of my quest, after all I’d done.
I stood up and paced briefly beside my chair, then turned to Krauss. “I have learned that in this country you can change your mind. I can do this job. If you find I’m not doing well, you can take back your money and give the fellowship to someone else.”
Dr. Krauss cocked his head, looking up at me. He slid a piece of paper toward me on his desk. “All right, Chia-lin. The fellowship comes with a stipend of sixteen hundred dollars a year. We’ll refund the portion of tuition you’ve already paid. Next class is tomorrow. You do know electromagnetics?”
“Of course.” I swallowed. I had never taken any courses on the subject.
“You’d better,” he said. “Because there are a lot of other lads here who could teach it in their sleep.” And then he sat back and smiled. “You’re an interesting man, Chia-lin,” he said. “I can see why Beck likes you.”
He pointed out a folder on his desk. “Course description. Follow the book and you should be fine.”
31
I WENT TO THE bookstore and picked up the introductory electromagnetics textbook listed in the folder. On my way out, I flipped to the chapter I was supposed to teach the next day. How had I managed to sound so confident with Krauss? I didn’t recognize a single one of the equations. I didn’t even recognize the concepts titling some of the sections.
I ran back to my apartment and sped through the first two chapters. But the material was too dense to be skimmed and I was so panicked I could hardly absorb any information. I reread the first chapter, scribbling some notes onto a piece of paper, and tried to calm myself. All I had to do was follow the book; the man had said so.
I did the first problem and got stuck. Luckily I had the teacher’s answer key.
Follow the book. Follow the book.
THE FIRST CLASS was a disaster. As long as I talked and followed the book, I was fine. But unfortunately the students asked questions.
“Pardon?” I said.
“What?” they said in reply to my mumbled, shamefaced explanations.
I stopped by the department office, hanging my head. Mrs. Larsson was bent over her copy machine. She wore a pink shirtdress with a full skirt, its buttons closed, thankfully, all the way up to her throat.
“No letters today!” she said brightly. “But the registrar’s office called. They have your tuition refund.”
“Oh, good,” I said, feeling a pang of guilt.
“That’s a relief, isn’t it?” She winked over the dull roar of the infrared copy machine.
Infrared.
“Herschel!” I exclaimed.
“God bless you!” Mrs. Larsson said, feigning alarm.
“That’s what we’ll do,” I said. “Herschel and Ritter.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Where can I find some prisms?”
“Prisms?”
“Yes, you know—glass, to split the light.”
“You mean, like this?” She turned to a large pile of papers on her desk and took a large triangular prism off the top. It was perfect.
“Well, yes. But it’s yours.”
“I just use it as a paperweight. But don’t lose it. Professor Beck got it at a symposium. There are more like it in a drawer somewhere around here.” She looked around and started rifling through cabinets. “Oh, here.” She pulled out a cardboard box filled to the brim with identical prisms. “They’re a little scratched. Will they do?”
“Very well.” I took the box. “Now I need some thermometers and some ammonia.”
She looked at me and put her hands on her hips.
“For science,” I said.
FOR MY NEXT class, we spread out on the grass and reproduced simplified versions of Herschel and Ritter’s discoveries of infrared and ultraviolet light. The students bent over their prisms, recording the temperature of the different parts of the spectrum and the part just beyond. Being outdoors with the Black Hills on the horizon made me feel like Wen-chong, like Gleason. It was the American approach to science. To break free from the textbook, to be free from convention. Of course, it wasn’t Maxwell’s equations, but we would have time for that . . .
“That’s swell,” I heard someone say. “It’s hottest just off the red, just like the books say.”
“Sure it is. But I did this in high school. There’s a satellite orbiting the earth and we’re doing experiments from 1800.”
I felt my face flush, and I glanced around the grass to see if the other students were laughing at me. They appeared not to have heard, though I knew some of them must have, and I went back to work, quietly finishing recording my own data. I went around from one group of students to another, checking their thermometers. For the most part the students were very polite, smiling and nodding and dutifully recording their numbers. But now I knew what they were thinking underneath their pleasant, perfect American smiles. I was nothing but a fraud, and they’d exposed me already, in my second class.
I looked up into the sky. There was a moving glint of silver in the far distance, and I felt a brief moment of excitement when I thought it could be Sputnik, but then it transformed into a plane with a contrail. Somewhere up above that plane, far above the layers of atmosphere, was that silver orb, tumbling, beeping.
If only I had a good dipole and a forty-megahertz receiver, I could listen to that beeping.
“Aha!” I said aloud. A few of the students looked up at me. “Who would like to help track Sputnik’s orbit?”
WE STILL HAD to learn the textbook, of course—I and the class. We couldn’t spend all our time on the roof, and we had to coordinate with the other graduate students and professors who took interest in the subject. But everything we studied in the book I tried to relate to Sputnik. The project focused my mind and gave me an incentive to learn the material well enough to teach it.
Yoshiko was worried.
Are you sure that’s what you’re supposed to do? Shouldn’t you teach the material in the book, as the head of the department asked you to?
Partway through the semester, Beck returned. “What’s going on?” he said. “Krauss says you’re turning electromagnetics into astrophysics. Says you’re popular but the kids aren’t sure they’re learning the basic material.”
“I had to do it this way.” I felt some remorse at deceiving him. “You see, my college was not really—”
“What’s that to do with anything?”
“I don’t know the material. I need to learn it this way. I need to teach it this way. Connecting it to practical applications.”
He was unpacking bundles of Swedish goodies from a large bag onto his desk. “Well, that’s not a very efficient way of learning theory. Here, that’s for you. It’s called a snowball. Brought a bunch home. Things damn near broke my back.”
I opened the heavy little box in my hand. It contained a candle holder made of thick glass.
“What’s more efficient?” I said. “I’ve been cross-referencing two different textbooks, too.”
“Reading three different books is efficie
nt? I don’t know. Try the Socratic method, maybe.”
“What’s that?”
He looked at me, his hand in the bottom of the bag. “Why is the sky blue?”
“Why is—oh, the . . . uh, it absorbs the—”
“Exactly. You need to practice answering questions. Best way to learn. You’ll know the stuff cold and you can teach it no problem.” He took a box of gingersnaps out of the bag and unwrapped it.
“Who will ask me questions?”
He shrugged and handed me a cookie. “I’ll ask you. You have to come up with the answers, though.”
I bit into the thin cookie, tasting the sweet spiciness.
“How’s your wife?” he asked, biting into his own gingersnap.
“I think she’s better,” I said.
“Better than what?”
“She had tuberculosis.”
He stopped chewing for a moment. “You didn’t tell me.”
“You weren’t here.”
“Oh.” He chewed a bit and swallowed. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have given you such a hard time.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, well.” He grabbed a bottle of liquor from the bag and headed out the door of his office. “Now you know you earned your fellowship. Mrs. Larsson! Schnapps!”
I followed him out of the office, and Mrs. Larsson handed him a letter.
“From Senator Dickey,” she said. She took the bottle of schnapps and admired the label. “Ah, the real stuff,” she said, smiling.
Beck read the letter and set it down on the counter silently, avoiding my glance.
My heart quickened. “What is it?” I said.
He touched the letter lightly with his finger. “The tuberculosis. Turns out they know about it, too, and that’s a problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s communicable.”
“But how do they know? Who told them?”
“I don’t know, Chia-lin. But they know.”
32
I CALLED SENATOR DICKEY. I wired Toru. I called Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington.
