An Elegant Theory

by Noah Milligan

  Shear. Shear. Shear.

  She stopped. “What did you just say?”

  Her eyes seemed yellow to Coulter, the color of cream, like she hadn’t been sleeping well. Coulter thought she might be sick; she had been drinking a lot of cough syrup lately, the stuff that made him so drowsy he’d pass out within fifteen minutes. He hated that stuff. Each time he drank it, he woke up with a terrible headache and couldn’t remember a thing. She, however, was bigger than him—perhaps it didn’t have quite the same effect on her.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just that I had fun today. Dianne’s a really nice lady.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I must be hearing things.”

  The children started arriving a few hours later. They were kids from school—Marcus and Anthony and Ryan and Kiley and Margot and Peyton and Matt and Andrea. His whole class had been invited. He had a few close friends, Ryan and Anthony mostly, who he’d spend the night with every once in a while. They had different interests, of course, neither one especially enjoyed science. They played basketball and video games and rode four-wheelers, and Coulter tagged along. He never felt he was invited out of pity or anything like that, but because he wasn’t as good as them at these activities, he did feel marginalized, a bit out of place, weird even.

  Dianne showed up, too, which surprised Coulter. He’d told her about the party earlier that morning, right after he’d taken a photograph of her, the tornado snaking away from them in the distance, and she’d said that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea for her to go, but there she was, looking awkward as she held a present in her hands. She peered around until she found Dad, waved at him, and approached. He didn’t look all that happy to see her. He scowled like when Coulter would use his power tools without asking, but she kept coming, threw her arms around his neck, pulled back to say something but didn’t let go. Dad looked angry, said something, but Coulter couldn’t make out exactly what he’d said. He’d tried to read his lips—What are you thinking? That’s what it had looked like, but that didn’t make any sense. She was, after all, just trying to be nice to Coulter.

  As soon as all the kids got there, they started the events. They played Pin the Tail on the Donkey, each of them taking turns. Dad spun a kid around and around and around until she could hardly walk and then nudged her in the direction of the donkey, and the kids and parents tried to help her out. “Turn left!” they’d yell. “Turn right! Go, Go, GO!” The tail used Velcro instead of something sharp so the kids wouldn’t accidentally stab themselves or someone else, which was probably a good thing as a few of them fell down. They broke the piñata next. Coulter went first, again being spun by his father before being handed an aluminum baseball bat—a bit paradoxical, Coulter thought, given that this really could hurt somebody—and Coulter was led to the piñata. Blindfolded, he couldn’t see a thing, only had his father’s voice to guide him. “It’s right in front of you,” he said. “Just swing as hard as you can.” Coulter missed wildly, and the other children laughed. Although he knew they weren’t mocking him, he was still embarrassed, his cheeks turning the color of ripe apples.

  Mom didn’t participate in any of the activities, instead opting to hang back in the periphery. She chain-smoked cigarettes out by the hedges and drank several Diet Cokes. Her mouth hung open, smoke trickling out between her lips. Occasionally someone, another mother, stopped by to speak to her. They kept their hands in their pockets and didn’t stay very long, Coulter’s mother not even taking the time to look in their direction. Soon the other women gave up and left Mom alone, smoking.

  Once, about an hour into the party, Dianne went over there. She appeared timid when she approached, like she might be afraid of Mom. Dianne said something to her, her head bowed. Mom picked a stray piece of tobacco from her tongue, then ashed her cigarette toward Dianne’s feet. Dianne nodded, cowered away as if in defeat.

  Dad stopped Dianne on the other side of the lawn. Again Coulter tried to read his lips—You need to leave. He grabbed her by the shoulder, but she didn’t budge. You’re making a scene, she said. Mom lit another cigarette. Coulter climbed into the bouncy castle, tried not to be happy as he jumped around.

  The gifts were eclectic and mostly didn’t interest Coulter: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures, a baseball glove (it was spring, after all), a Frisbee, a video game from Anthony, one he probably had bought so he had something to play when he came over. None of these gifts Coulter actually wanted, or intended to play with, but he smiled and thanked the giver anyway; they were thoughtful if nothing else.

  After presents it was time for cake, a German chocolate, Coulter’s favorite. Everyone crowded around, even his mother, who lit the eleven candles. He’d thought long and hard about his wish for about a week now, flip-flopping between foregoing the ritual and keeping it. It was childish, after all, but a little piece of him, albeit a superstitious one, still clung to the idea of it having credence. Mind over matter. The power of positive thinking. There had been scientific studies giving them credibility. Besides, there stood Dianne, the object of his wish. She lingered near the back of the crowd, staring up at Coulter with a big smile on her face. She looked beautiful with an unbuttoned cardigan and white blouse. There was something about her that Coulter couldn’t quite articulate. He’d never been very much interested in girls. They were simply people, just like him. He understood eventually that would change, that adult men and adult women were sexually attracted to each other, but it had always been an abstract idea to Coulter, like the “Allegory of the Cave” or rocket propulsion. Now, though, he started to feel something confusing within him. It was like going through turbulence on an airplane. His stomach dropped. His ears popped. He wanted her. He felt grown up. He had, and understood the object of, his first erection.

  And that’s what he wished for: Dianne.

  He blew out the candles in one breath, and everyone clapped. He could’ve sworn Dianne winked at him—AT HIM!—but he couldn’t be one hundred percent sure. For one, she was standing in his peripheral, and secondly, his father stood right behind him.

  Mom moved in to cut the cake. She took the knife and scooted in next to Coulter and began to cut. When she brought the blade through, however, she caught her left hand by mistake. She held up the wound. It was deep, tissue glistening under the sunlight. Blood squirted onto the cake. The kids screamed, and the adults gasped. But Mom simply stood there, holding her hand up high. Coulter assumed she did so in order to keep the wound above her heart, slow the bleeding, but her expression didn’t seem to support his theory. She looked proud—like she did the whole thing on purpose.

  THE FUNERAL WAS HELD IN OKLAHOMA, BUT there was no body. It had remained in Massachusetts, evidence in the ongoing homicide investigation. I found the whole enterprise odd, burying a casket with no body, and had to fight the urge to point out the futility of it all when Gary and Marissa had first proposed the idea to me, but I didn’t. They needed closure, and they needed it sooner rather than later. Who was I to take that away from them? I had already taken so much.

  At this point, the police had not formally announced me as a suspect, but I knew they would. It was only a matter of time. I surmised that Sara’s family had their suspicions. At the funeral, Sara’s cousins cast sideways glances at me like they were plotting revenge, making plans to gut me, the bastard who had murdered their little cousin. I didn’t blame them for this. They were angry and confused, and I would’ve been, too, if I didn’t know the truth. Marissa was the worst, though. She could hardly speak. She could hardly breathe. She just wheezed. She wheezed and she gasped and she wailed. Gary tried to console her but nothing worked. He just held her as she shook in his arms.

  Despite that, it was a nice fall day for a funeral. The grass had turned brown weeks before, the leaves already fallen, now brittle upon the ground. The mosquitoes were dead. Crows had flown further south. Amongst the tree line, white tails rubbed their antlers against the blackjack oaks, and above the canopy wisps of smoke rose from several chi
mneys in the adjacent neighborhood. The scene made me nostalgic in a way I hadn’t felt in years, since Sara and I’d first moved to Boston. I remembered those first few weeks we’d talked about all the things we missed: Sonic cheeseburgers and fry bread and the rumble of a Ford F-150. Family and friends and Love’s Country Stores. It was strange to feel that way again, especially at my wife’s funeral. I’d expected to feel grief and sadness and regret and shame. But not nostalgia. A welcome, strange happenstance I suppose.

  Sara’s eulogy was done by committee. Her aunt and uncle talked about when she’d come visit in the summers and had to have pancakes every morning. They spoke about how she’d demanded to wear cowboy boots with these blue gym shorts and wouldn’t leave the house without this stuffed animal buffalo she’d named Papsy. Friends talked about her teen days, how she’d sneak a little whiskey into her Oklahoma History class and mix it with Country Time Lemonade, about that one fourth of July she’d accidentally set a couch on fire with a Roman Candle, and how she used to draw cartoons of boys she thought were cute getting injured, victims of car accidents or a mugging. They always thought it was weird, but she just laughed, said it was easier than talking to them. Gary spoke about when Sara had been a little girl, how her laugh resembled the sound of a playful dolphin and how she led him on treasure hunts to the hall closet, ransacking it of old textbooks and photo albums. I couldn’t help but note that all the stories recounted took place before I’d met Sara. I didn’t know if this was on purpose, but I sort of reveled in this. It was as if they didn’t know the woman who was my wife. That person was mine and mine alone. Selfish, I knew, but I couldn’t help but feel somewhat special.

  I considered giving my own little eulogy. Something short. Something personal. Something only I knew. There was one thing in particular I wanted to share, an event that had occurred about a year after we’d moved to Boston. We were broke at the time, as usual, and we hadn’t really gone out since the move, so one night out of nowhere Sara asked if I wanted to go for a walk. A date night, she said, like we used to have. I agreed, and we headed over to Faneuil Hall. We didn’t have anywhere to go in particular so we just walked and talked and window-shopped. That night there were a bunch of street performers out, entertaining tourists. There was a guy that set a wooden chair on fire and balanced it on his forehead. Another contorted his body until he could fit himself into a small, glass box. Another could recite your zip code by giving him your hometown’s name. There were musicians and magicians and women acting like robots. It was all good and fun, and we watched a few perform. One particularly caught Sara’s attention, a woman who breathed fire, swallowed swords, and performed acrobatic stunts on a low-strung tightrope. A large crowd had gathered to watch her perform, and she gave a little speech while riding atop a six-foot tall unicycle. She warned the children not to imitate her, or if they did, not to tell the authorities they got the act from her, and gave a little history about herself, how she’d traveled from Portland to Boulder to Nashville to Boston over the course of three years, making a living as a street performer, and she encouraged people to give according to how much they were entertained: a dollar for a “meh,” a five spot for “that was kinda cool,” a tenner for “wow,” a twenty for “holy shit that was awesome,” and a hundred dollar bill just for her to go away. The crowd laughed, and the woman began her routine, eating swords and juggling fire and riding her unicycle. When she was done, she dismounted and raised her arms like a gymnast sticking the landing, and the people clapped and cheered and whistled their approval. After taking her obligatory bows, she used a top hat to canvass the gathering for donations, and everyone chipped in what they could, a dollar here, some change there, a ten spot here. Soon the crowd dispersed, and the street performer began to assemble her belongings into a large trunk. I tried to walk away, but Sara grabbed my hand to keep me from leaving. She approached the woman and struck up a conversation. I stayed back and couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she was smiling and Sara was smiling and it seemed like they were cordial with each other. But when the woman turned around, Sara bent down, grabbed a handful of cash from the top hat, and then stuffed the bills into her purse. When the lady turned around, Sara bid her goodbye, and we walked away, two hundred dollars, I later learned, richer. I didn’t know why that was the particular story I wanted to recount. I guess I just wanted to let everyone know that she wasn’t perfect. She wasn’t always nice and thoughtful and empathetic. Sometimes she stole. Sometimes she just wasn’t a very good person. I didn’t, though. Staying quiet just seemed like the right thing to do.

  Once everyone had spoken who wanted to, men who worked for the cemetery lowered the empty casket into the ground and then placed a shovel in front of the opening. One by one, family members shoveled a pile of dirt onto the grave. Some threw in mementos alongside it: a weathered note written years ago, a beaded plastic necklace, a photograph taken before she’d moved north with me. Afterward, a few friends came by to offer the family their condolences. When they shook my hand, they said they were sorry, casting awkward glances at their feet, but I could tell they said it more out of tradition than any sincere concern. I’d never really been close with any of them, Sara having mostly cut ties with them once we’d married, and I’d always secretly thought they’d advised Sara never to marry me, but when I asked Sara about it, she’d just shrug, say that everyone has their own opinions. Every once in a while one would come visit or we’d go visit them, but there’d always been this unspoken barrier between us, like a magnetic field created by like charges. I never really took the time to get to know them, and they never took the time to get to know me. We’d been comfortable in this arrangement. Everything was just easier if we remained strangers.

  Afterward, most attendees lingered, stared at the ground or the sky or their hands. No one seemed to know what to do next, and instead they silently waited around for instructions. As I watched them, I couldn’t help but think of them as subjects in a social science experiment. Funerals are supposed to offer some sort of closure. They are a dividing line. The loved one is gone, and then it’s time to grieve until you can move on. Watching Sara’s friends and family, though, I wasn’t sure if they’d ever succeed. It was like they were waiting for some sort of cataclysmic event to mark the occasion: a thunderstorm, an earthquake, drought, tornado. They yearned for some sort of destruction, a physical manifestation of their inner turmoil, but Mother Nature did not comply. Instead, it was serene. Peaceful even. The result was that they just ended up looking lost.

  During my 10:00 am class, Quantum Physics 1, I lectured on electron-positron annihilation in quantum electrodynamics. This phenomenon occurs when an electron collides with a positron, its antiparticle, and creates particles like the Higgs Boson, otherwise known as the God Particle.

  The process must satisfy a number of laws, and as such, there is only a very limited set of possibilities for the final state. While it is a dry lecture, the phenomenon is quite remarkable. Two antithetical subatomic particles collide, then create another subatomic particle through the collision’s energy. Creation through antithesis.

  “The subatomic world is quite strange,” I said. “Intuitively, we have a hard time picturing the creation of matter through energy alone. Matter, biologically speaking, begets matter. Humans birth humans. Flowers produce flowers. Insects, insects. Energy of course is an abstraction. Ephemeral. An indirectly observed quality. Kinetic, potential, radiant, but not tangible or practical. We can’t touch energy. We can’t pick it up and throw it. But it is true. Energy can create matter, but it must destroy in order to do so. The colliding particles annihilate in order to create. Destruction. Rebirth. It’s almost a recurring cycle, isn’t it?”

  Students and guests packed the auditorium. As soon as my work had begun to garner attention, students who had previously dropped the class returned, students I’d never seen before showed up, even fellow graduate students attended my lectures, the attendance ballooning each class period on an exponential b
asis. They hung on my every word. They took notes feverishly. Some, I was convinced, weren’t even students or affiliated with the university whatsoever. They didn’t carry backpacks or bring notebooks or computers. They didn’t take notes or record my lectures. They simply sat there, as if spectators at a sporting event. A few wore business suits. Others had gaudy jewelry dangling from their wrists and ears and necks. One especially looked familiar, a face I’d seen around the neighborhood, not around campus, but back in the Dot, a neighbor even. She seemed older than the rest of the students. Not old by any means, perhaps mid-to-late thirties, her features still had that fresh quality to it, her lips plump and full, her eyes bright white and wide, but she had that weathered look, chiseled and stern, having lived a longer life than her years would let on. She had a bruise on her cheekbone. It wasn’t a fresh one, deep blue or purple, but a pea green color, like it was healing. At first, I tried to brush these thoughts away, thinking they stemmed from paranoia, the result of my recent interrogation by Detective Landsmen, but I couldn’t quite shake them, racking my brain on how I knew this woman.

  I continued my lecture. My next topic included the Higgs Boson. It’s an elementary particle, I said, first theorized in 1964 and confirmed not too long ago by CERN. Its discovery was monumental as it explained why some fundamental particles have mass when they shouldn’t and could give us greater understanding of the formation of the universe directly after the Big Bang. I scanned the audience as I spoke, and then my eyes rested upon the woman again. I lost my train of thought, and my tongue felt too large for my mouth and stuck to my teeth. I could not pinpoint the identity of the woman in the crowd, and it was driving me nuts, like the forgotten words of a cherished lyric, tickling the tip of the tongue.