“In there,” he said, pointing behind him. She did not move and after a moment he said, “Are you OK?”
“Why are you here?”
“Just visiting.”
“Mr. Corcoran was just leaving,” Jennifer’s voice came from behind him, the words clipped and quiet. She moved past him and picked up Nicole in her arms and the bedroom door closed abruptly behind them.
Keith stood alone in the hall, the muffled sounds of television and mother and daughter murmuring around him. Then he turned and walked down the stairs in the darkness. The lower floor quiet. He stood at the foot of the stairs, the silence complete, and then stepped forward through the plaster arch and into the living room. The sofa and the television like giant creatures that had fallen into a deep slumber. Knickknacks on the mantel cast into a collection of angles and shadows. Everything in the house had a place and each place had been chosen not for utility but for display: towels in the bathroom that could not be used, floral soaps that would never be unwrapped from their unbleached paper wrappers, pillows on the bed that could not be slept on. An entire life organized based upon the notion of being watched, of being monitored and judged by neighbors, by friends, perhaps even by himself, and here he stood in the quiet, shadowed and frozen as if part of it somehow: a man from one house in the darkness of another.
“What are you doing?”
The voice startled him and he spun around abruptly. She was standing behind him on the last stair, holding the neck of her bathrobe in one hand, the other still gripping the banister.
“Oh,” he said. He looked into the darker shadows of the living room. “I was … I’m not doing anything.”
“And?” she said. There was an edge to her voice.
“And I’ll see you later,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said.
He turned toward her, toward the door, and she stared at him as he passed. There was no pleasure or joy in her eyes. He opened the door and turned the lock on the handle as he had been told and stepped outside. He thought she would say something to him before the door closed, a simple parting word or words, but she did not and he pulled the door closed.
There was a brightness to the sounds outside. The humming streets beyond the roofline of darkened houses. From the field: crickets. The brush of the air against his face was just barely cool and he looked across the street at his own bleak house. Nothing there. No one home. Never anyone home. It occurred to him that he had been summarily dismissed from Jennifer’s house but he found himself more surprised than irritated or angered. Maybe it was the second time, when they had sex in the shower; maybe he had been too insistent. But then he knew he had not been too insistent, that it had actually been Jennifer who had instigated that second time and indeed had instigated the first. What was it then?
He stepped across the street toward his house but then swiveled and moved instead toward the dark streetlamp at the farthest edge of the cul-de-sac. It was akin to the end of the world, the light fading out. He looked into that emptiness for Peter and it was not until he took his first tentative step past the sidewalk and into the thistle-lined path that he realized he was disappointed that he could neither see nor hear him. No one in the field but himself and no telescope to justify the night.
Interval: Light
(cΔt)2 = (Δr)2
(Δs)2 = 0
It had always been part of his plan to make captain before resigning for a position with NASA and it worked out as he knew it would, although that first position would not be at Johnson Space Center as he had hoped. The head researchers there told him they were very interested in his skills and qualifications but that there were few positions open and none that he was particularly suited for. It was disappointing, but he knew there were advantages to coming into the astronaut program from some other NASA facility. And so he settled on Dreyfuss Research Center, a smaller facility but an important one. The position there was a perfect match for his mathematics and engineering skills and would extend the kind of work he had been doing at Wright-Patterson during his time in the air force: low-energy / high-power propulsion and guidance systems. There was the further incentive that the research at Dreyfuss fed exclusively into various ongoing missions and this meant, at long last, that his work would be going directly into space.
A month before his start date at Dreyfuss he flew out to look at neighborhoods in the vicinity of his new employment, touring the endlessly sprawling metropolitan area on the arm of a realtor. Barb’s opinions had always been strong in regards to house styles, floor plans, shopping proximity, school districts, and the like and now those opinions saw the three of them—he and Barb and Quinn, the latter sullen and quiet in the backseat, angry at having to move away from her friends in Ohio—driving in seemingly endless circles, farther and farther from the research center until they finally happened upon a suburb that met her standards. It was a relatively new neighborhood across from a small park but what made this area different from any of the other twenty or so neighborhoods they had already driven through he could not begin to understand and he argued against the location with some vigor even though he knew that he would ultimately lose. With traffic, the commute to Dreyfuss would be a full hour and a half in each direction on four lanes of freeway blacktop through an endless maze of chain stores and parking lots, and through five apparently separate but identical communities. He told himself he was unconcerned with the tedium of the drive, but each evening on his way home he would pass a freeway sign that read: “If you lived here you would be home by now.” It was savage irony that the community the sign advertised appeared to be exactly like the one in which they had settled.
The lone upside was that they were close to a high school for gifted students, the Academy of Arts and Sciences. At least Quinn would have some place to study, a school that might match her talents and which would push her forward on her own unbound vector, the magnitude of which had yet to be measured. She had been examined for the gifted program at the end of her fourth-grade year—the earliest she could at the grammar school she had attended in Ohio—and had tested at the tenth-grade level in math.
“Don’t get any ideas,” Barb had told him then.
“Ideas about what?” he answered
“You’re going to try to turn her into a math geek or something. I just know it.” Her tone was playful and she was smiling, proud of her daughter, of their daughter.
“I think she’s already a math geek,” he said.
She looked at him. “Well, don’t make it worse.”
“Don’t worry,” he told her. “I won’t.”
Of course she excelled in her math classes. It was what he expected of her. And she had a gift for it so how could it be any different? Was she not her father’s daughter? Sometimes, when he arrived home early enough in the evening for her to still be awake, he would watch her do her homework, watch the numbers she wrote down and the numbers she did not, the gaps in the process that nonetheless led to accurate answers: her tiny girl’s hands skipping along the page, answering another problem, moving on to the next. Her pencil like a butterfly alighting here and there: a symbol, a number, a variable, and then, finally, the answer. He had not been so adept at her age. She was better than he was and she would go further. This was what he had decided, but there had been few classes at her school to develop her gift. Her last teacher had given up entirely on having her follow the curriculum, instead bringing a college algebra textbook from home and having her work through those problems during class time.
And yet when he brought up the academy to Quinn her immediate response was to call it “nerd school.”
“Oh come on,” he said. “What does that even mean?”
They were at the dinner table now and Quinn did not even look up from her plate, stirring green mushy peas around the outer edge, slowly, as if working out a problem or a design of some kind. “It means it’s nerd school.”
“Honey, don’t call people names,” Barb said. “I’m sure they’re very
smart.”
“That’s what nerd means, Mom. Smart.”
“That can’t be a bad thing, then, can it?” Barb said.
“No, it’s not bad,” Quinn said. “It just is.”
“I don’t like your tone,” Barb said.
Quinn said nothing for a long moment and in the silence Keith speared a cube of pork chop with the end of his fork. “I think it would be really good for you,” he said. “Going to a school like that.”
“Sounds like it’s for super-smart kids.”
“You don’t think you’re smart enough?” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said.
He looked up at her now. His daughter. “Then what is it?” he said.
“Because it’s nerd school.”
“You mean the reputation of the school?”
“Yeah, it’s for nerds.”
“Who cares?”
“I do,” she said.
And then Barb, from across the table: “Really, Keith?”
“She’s smart,” he said.
“I know she’s smart,” Barb said, “but private school? Do you know how much something like that costs? Maybe we should talk about this later.”
“It’s probably expensive,” he said. “But that’s not a good reason not to do it.”
“It’s not?”
“We’d have to make some sacrifices.”
“Hello, parents. I’m still here,” Quinn said.
“Quinn, listen,” he said.
“I am listening. You guys are freaking me out.”
“Don’t freak out,” he said. “There’s no reason to freak out.”
“Well, then don’t make me freak out,” she said. “We just moved and now you want to put me in some weird school.”
He sat there at the table, not speaking now. He had not even brought up any of the aspects of the school he found particularly interesting or useful, had not even brought up how it might help her embrace the gift he now knew she possessed and which public school had not accessed at all. Already he felt defeated.
“Christ, you two,” he said. “I’m trying to help here.”
Quinn was quiet. Then she said, “I know, Dad. I know you are.”
“Can we at least not call it ‘nerd school’?” he said.
“What should we call it then?”
“The academy.”
“The Academy of Nerds?”
“Quinn, that’s enough,” Barb said.
“OK, OK,” she said. She was smiling though, seemingly on the verge of laughter.
“It’s a good school,” he said.
“It’s for smart people.”
“You are smart people.”
“Yeah, but not like that.”
“Yes, like that.”
“No, I mean, not like they are. They’re … like you.”
“Like me? What do you mean?”
She was silent now, staring at her plate.
“Seriously, Quinn, what do you mean?”
“Can you just drop it?” Barb said.
“No,” he said. There was no anger or irritation in his voice, perhaps because it did not occur to him what she meant. So he said it again, “What, Quinn? What?”
“Dad, it’s just … you know …”
“No, I don’t know.”
She still would not look at him, her eyes focused on her plate. Her peas. Her pork chop. “You’re not, like, normal.”
“I’m not normal?”
“Don’t be mad.”
“I’m not mad.”
“I don’t mean it like it’s bad.”
“How do you mean it then?”
“You know … you’re, like … different.”
“Different how?”
“Can we talk about something else?” Barb said.
He did not respond or even look at his wife until he felt her hand on his arm. Then he turned. Her eyes were wide and the look on her face was one of concern.
“We’ll talk about this later,” Barb said. “Can’t we? Can’t we talk about this later?”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “OK. Later then.”
“Thank you,” Barb said. “Now let’s talk about something else.” She exhaled audibly and turned back to her dinner plate. “How was work?” she said.
“Fine,” he said. “Work was fine.”
Then it was quiet at the table, each of them chewing, focused on their dinner plates. On pork chops. On rolling green peas.
In the months that followed, he might have continued to press her on the issue of the school, or at least might have focused on her progress. Later he would pick apart his inability to do so but at the time his own life had become a frantic push. Missions were constantly in development and his engineering work was regularly going up with those missions. He was in ongoing communication with astronauts and like-minded research scientists and while there was, of course, some level of bureaucracy to deal with, the work itself was everything he had ever wanted. For the first time he could see himself actually becoming an astronaut, that ideal goal solidifying out of the dream or fantasy it had been in New Jersey so many years ago and achieving an incandescence fueled not only by his own desire and ambition but also by many of the high-level personnel at the research center, several of whom told him point-blank that they would love to see him apply for the astronaut training program in Houston and that they would be willing to help him get there.
For the first time, too, he was encountering physicists who worked with mathematical ideas he was utterly unfamiliar with, material that seemed in many ways to be completely impractical and yet was apparently providing at least partial answers to huge questions about how the universe itself functioned: its size, its shape, its speed, its lifespan. The mathematics here were staggering and he found himself drawn to the ideas even as they unsettled him. All his life he had focused on the tangible, the physical, the direct application, and some of the abstraction necessary for the enormous questions being asked was beyond his ability to embrace, if not understand.
It reminded him of his first encounter with fractals and chaos theory, and indeed more than one of the scientists at Dreyfuss had images of fractals pinned to the walls of their offices and labs: filigreed and ornamented shapes like flaming dragons comprised of delicate ferns, fire, soap bubbles, and snowflakes—all of which was, in actuality, the graphed results of subtly changing algorithms repeated thousands, hundreds of thousands, of times. He had been a junior in high school when he had first encountered similar images, these from a library book that he had checked out among several others. He had long since forgotten the other books but he had not forgotten the book on fractals. At the time he had heard of the subject but knew very little about it. And so he lay upon his bed after dinner and read captions about the Mandelbrot set and the dragon sweep and the Peano-Gosper curve and the Koch snowflake: all images presented in the text and all of which he viewed as mere mathematical curiosities or games, diversions that a mathematician might perform to pass the time. There were algorithms in the book and he punched one into his home computer—a rare gift from his parents upon the start of high school, rare because they could not afford such extravagances—and then turned to the other books, and later his homework, and then to the shower and his bed.
The next day he returned home from school and did not even think of the computer, had completely forgotten about what he had typed into it the previous evening, so that when he went to the screen long after dinner and saw the blocky bitmapped image there he did not at first know what it could be: a series of circles within circles, all of them arrayed in a kind of arc not unlike an oversize necklace. Then he remembered the algorithm, the math he had asked the computer to work on and realized that it had been working on that algorithm ever since, for over twenty-four hours, and what he was viewing now was the result of that period of time, the extent of what the computer could calculate. He changed the scale on the graph to highlight one of the smaller circles and realized then what he
might have already known had he read the text more carefully: that each of the circles was comprised of yet smaller circles and these too were comprised of even smaller circles. The image might have gone on like that forever had he a computer capable of the calculation.
It was interesting but nothing more than that because he still viewed it as a kind of game or diversion. He sat with the book again and worked out a few rows of numbers with his calculator and by hand, plotting them on a sheet of graph paper, moving on to another sheet when that first was full and continuing to graph. At some point he started the computer working on another algorithm, returning then to the pad of paper. The calculations were easy enough but the numbers that stacked themselves in their columns on the page made little sense to him and so he continued to work, to calculate. Iterated numbers of no central relation and a graph that appeared as if peppered with random points of no particular order. He could see no shape there, no sense of direction or method by which a curve or parabola or some other line could cut through the points.
He continued to work, absorbed now, not understanding, still feeling like he was missing some essential step or that he was performing the task somehow incorrectly because he had seen the image on the screen and knew there was order, that somehow the rows and rows of numbers would repeat to continue the motion of a particular shape, that such a repetition must be periodic, predictable, because the algorithm was folding back on itself to create the image. But the numbers did not seem to repeat, even though he already had a list of at least a hundred calculations. He returned to the book several times to make sure he was working through the process correctly, confirming that indeed he was, and during one of these confirmations he paged through to the center of the volume, there finding a small collection of color plates, not only of fractals—the shapes were called fractals, he had already learned—but of art as well: the beautifully painted waves of Hokusai, a pencil sketch of roiling clouds and water by Leonardo da Vinci, a series of photographs of clouds in a yellow sky, of moss on a gray stone. Self-similar shapes. Snowflakes that appeared finite to the human eye and yet were infinite in circumference. Not the numbers and yet indeed the numbers.
The Infinite Tides Page 18
