The Beautiful Miscellaneous

by Dominic Smith

  “What kind of thing is that to say?”

  “An observation. A premonition. Ask me why.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because I don’t have enough hobbies for old age.”

  “You’ve got time. Besides, forty’s not old,” I said.

  “The midpoint,” she said. It was a declaration, punctuated with a raised index finger.

  “Actually, the average age now for women is seventy-six,” I said.

  “Of course you know this,” she said.

  “What are your parents’ hobbies?” I asked, then instantly regretted it. I was still finding my romantic groove.

  “None.”

  “None?” I asked.

  “Unless you call arguing for two days about the same subject a hobby. One time—we were on vacation—and they argued about gas mileage in a rental car for forty-eight hours. Hotels, airports, driving, it never stopped. If that marriage dies it will be because somebody forgets to keep a receipt.”

  “They’ve got stamina,” I said. I drew on my cigarette.

  “What are your parents’ hobbies?” she asked.

  “My mother cooks ethnic food and cleans house and plans exotic trips.”

  “How middle class.”

  “She belongs to a travel club where they talk about Europe and Africa as if they’re paintings. My dad is a college professor and physicist. He makes his own beer and stares at his fingernails a lot.”

  We looked up at the windows.

  She said, “I don’t want to die in my sleep. That’s my only hope. I mean, where’s the point in that?” she said. “How do you want to go?”

  She knew about the accident but not my clinical death. For some reason I guarded that information; it seemed like an admission of something.

  She said, “Skydiving?”

  I shook my head.

  “Plane crash?”

  “Nope.”

  She angled and rotated her cigarette, urging me to get on with it.

  “In the accident I died. You know, briefly.”

  Her cigarette stopped moving. There was a silence. I looked at the little metropolis, the pedestrians waiting at the curbstone.

  “I was dead for barely any time at all,” I said.

  “That’s pretty fucking cool,” she said, rocking forward.

  “Clinically dead,” I said, slightly boastful now.

  “All the same.”

  “I don’t remember much of it.”

  She looked down at the canvas for a moment. “A feeling?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was there a feeling? I’ve spoken to patients who claim to have died and come back and they say it’s like—”

  “Like what?” I said.

  “One woman said it was like peeling off a wet swimsuit inside a golden tunnel.”

  “No.”

  “What, then?” She inhaled and on the out-breath said, “Tell me, if you want.”

  “I heard a sound like radio static. And I felt like I was rising out of warm water. That’s about it,” I said.

  She raised her eyebrows. “You got gypped.”

  “I know. But now when I remember the death I get a weird taste in my mouth, like an old penny.”

  “How do you know what an old penny tastes like? Were you one of those neurotic kids who shoved crap in their mouths?”

  “Somehow I just know. Sometimes when I remember things I get weird tastes in my mouth. The word biscuit tastes like raw potato.”

  “You taste things the rest of us don’t.”

  “I guess.”

  “What do I taste like?” she said.

  She sat away from me, an acre of canvas between us.

  “I don’t remember. Remind me,” I said.

  “A taste test,” she said, scooting forward.

  “Exactly.”

  We leaned forward at the same moment, two halves of a drawbridge coming back down. We kissed kneeling, slightly off balance.

  “Like bread and oranges,” I said.

  She sat down. “Well, I eat a sandwich and an orange every day for lunch like a good little Mennonite girl.” She paused. “You know what I taste?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Spit.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “How can we find another person’s spit bearable? That’s one of life’s great mysteries.”

  “I don’t know.”

  She said, “The body is a river of fluids.”

  “You would know.”

  “The math boys have dry mouths,” she said. “If you kissed Cal Saunders it would be as dry as chalk.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  We sat for a moment. A bell sounded for lights-out inside the main house.

  twenty-seven

  Every March the Brook-Mills Institute held an open house featuring a talent show put on by the current guests. Parents, scientists, and a few local media attended. The intention was probably to demonstrate the benefits of the program, but the result was weeks of anxiety for the current residents. Toby spent long hours practicing the piano and would come into our room at night, exhausted, dizzied by musical phrases. Dick and Cal were going to hold a question-and-answer session on their patent-pending process, but mostly they argued and played backgammon in the lead-up to the talent show. Roger was coming back to exhibit some of his scale models. Gillman had asked me to recite some history from the new book he’d given me. Teresa boycotted the event, calling it a circus.

  As the open house drew near, Gillman began to notice my tolerance for history was waning.

  “I miss television,” I said.

  “It’ll pass. You’re not yet in command of what you remember. There’s no selectivity. Your problem is that you are unable to forget.” He turned in his chair and leaned forward slightly. “Your parents and Whit received”—he brought his hands together—“an invitation to the open house. It would be great for them to see a new side of your memory. Tomorrow, I’d like you to tell me the major poets of the Romantic period and recite some of the verse.”

  I pictured my parents at the talent show and immediately thought of the seventh-grade science fair. My dry-ice volcano, the look of betrayal on my father’s face when I gave the final physics question to Darius Kaplansky. Did I want him staring up at me, his eyes brimmed with hope, as I named battles of the First World War or recited the love sonnets of the Romantics?

  A WEEK BEFORE THE OPEN house, my father drove through the night with Whit to visit me at the institute. My mother called to warn me about his intentions.

  “He wants to tell you about a physics experiment. He thinks it explains your memory.”

  “It’s the middle of the night,” I said.

  “Tell that to your father. He doesn’t sleep anymore. He tells me Michelangelo took three power naps every day while he painted the Sistine Chapel. Sleep is for the dead. He actually said that. Your father.”

  There was a hint of a rant in her voice. Without me in their house, my parents gave in to their excesses. My father stayed late at the college reading journals of psychiatry and physics while eating leftover pizza for dinner. My mother brooded in the house, read travel essays about Indonesian tree houses and Thai silkworms.

  “I’ll be on the lookout,” I said.

  “Nathan?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You can come home anytime. I’ve spoken to your father about it. He needs some convincing still.”

  Although I occasionally missed my parents, I felt mostly relieved to be out of their household. I looked down the hallway. Teresa’s door caught my eye—the collage of imminent disasters. I didn’t speak for some time. “I have to go to bed now, Mom. Thanks for the heads-up.” I slowly hung up the phone.

  Before breakfast my father and Whit drove up in the Oldsmobile. Whit sat behind the wheel; my father was reading in the passenger seat. Whit got out and stretched his arms and legs. I w
alked down the steps to greet them. I didn’t want my father and Whit to eat breakfast in the dining room. I could see it in my father’s eyes: he was crazy with an idea.

  “Hello, son,” he said.

  “Hey there, Mozart,” Whit said, grabbing me around the shoulders. “Did we make it for chow time?”

  “Let’s go for a walk,” I said. “Then I want to go out for pancakes.”

  “Yes, a walk would be nice,” my father said. “I have something I want to discuss.”

  I walked between them and led them out through the fields, toward the seasonal creek.

  “Cows makes me nervous,” Whit said. “They’re like asteroids.”

  “They’re nothing like asteroids,” I said. I was annoyed that they were here. Whit had become my father’s lackey.

  Whit said, “If you’ve ever seen a lump of molten star-fuel spinning for you in orbit, you’d know what I mean.”

  “Whit may have a point,” my father said. “He may have a very good point.” Whit and my father now had the air of a long-married couple. My father needed a coach, somebody to coax him to the world of the living, while Whit needed an esoteric mind, somebody who would allow him to orbit.

  Whit pulled at cornstalks as we walked in single file through the furrows. When we came to the creek, we sat on the gravel bed. My father picked up a handful of pebbles, weighed them in his hands, and said, “All my best ideas seem to come with the headaches these days.”

  “I know. Mom called me. She says you don’t sleep anymore.”

  “Lots of brain food and twenty-minute naps,” Whit said in the tone of a personal trainer.

  “So what’s your new theory?” I asked my father.

  He cleared his throat and picked up a small piece of quartz.

  “There’s this experiment in physics. Bell’s theorem. Very famous. It reminds us how our minds are not separate—they’re waves in the infinite field. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before. You have this titanium box and you create a vacuum inside. There’s a small hole at one end, big enough for a probe. Once the vacuum is created you weigh the box…”

  “Now, the box is special,” Whit said. “The sides are calibrated to detect the smallest change in mass inside the box…” He pointed at the creek, as if a titanium box were floating downstream.

  “So you know that the vacuum state is present because the weight is almost zero. The closest thing to nothingness that there is. Do you follow so far?” my father said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  My father stared at the piece of quartz in his hand. “So the experimenter places an electron probe into the vacuum and takes a measurement. The only thing it can detect is the presence of an electron. When the probe is placed inside, the mass inside the box changes.”

  “Of course it changes,” I said. “The probe weighs something.”

  “No. You deduct the weight of the probe and still there is a change in mass. What is it that gets inside the box?” he asked. His eyes were trained on the creek. It flowed brown with field runoff.

  “Pass,” I said.

  “An electron, of course,” he said.

  “So what?” I countered.

  “Where did it come from? One instant there is nothing. Then you stick in a probe and an electron is manifested out of the vacuum.”

  “And you know what else?” Whit said.

  “What?” I said.

  “If you stick in a proton probe, the vacuum creates a proton.”

  “What’s this got to do with my memory and synesthesia?”

  “Here’s the thing,” my father said, slightly out of breath. “The unified field creates a particle inside the titanium box based on the experimenter’s intention. His question is illustrated by the kind of probe he sticks in there. The probe is the question. It’s like your memory. The information is manifested at the time you try to remember it. You pluck it from thin air.” He spread his hands apart, dropping the quartz back onto the creek bed.

  I had no patience for my father’s breathy earnestness, for the way he expected me to be wowed by his insights. I said, “You drove here to tell me this? I remember things because words and sounds are like fireworks. I don’t pluck them out of thin air—they explode in the air.”

  “That description is not incompatible with my theory,” my father said.

  Whit looked apologetic. He understood the experiment but was hazy on its implications for why I could recite a metropolitan phone book. “We also came for the drive,” he ventured.

  “I’m going to tell Gillman about my idea. What if synesthesia is like the probe inside the vacuum? He might find it interesting,” my father said.

  “Dad, it’s not interesting,” I said, standing. “He’ll think it’s ridiculous.” But I pictured my father pitching his theory to Gillman, a brandy balloon in one hand, the two men alone in the dining room. Speculation, hypothesis, proof—the capstones of science could hide the obvious and the bogus. They’d discuss the whole thing matter-of-factly, my brain like a crankcase, and Gillman would listen and nod, bound by the methodology, the scientific pact, occasionally throwing a piece of his own conjecture onto the pile. I started back for the house, hurried down a corn row. Someone was behind me. I could tell it was Whit by his footfall.

  “I think you hurt your father’s feelings. He’s got a bee under the hood about your memory. It’ll work itself out,” he said.

  “He spends his whole life thinking about things that don’t exist or that nobody can see.”

  “That’s the best thing about him,” Whit said. I turned around. My father was still sitting on the creek bed, his hands sifting through stones. I continued walking. “You know what’s amazing?”

  I looked at him.

  Whit said, “I’ve never in ten years heard your father gossip. He doesn’t even notice what other people do with their lives.”

  “He notices what I do with mine, believe me,” I said. “You don’t understand, Whit. My whole life I’ve never had a normal conversation with him. He never asks me about my friends. He’s never talked to me about girls.”

  “That’s not his frequency.” He hesitated, then said, “I can tell you about girls if you want to know. I’m a little out of practice but I still bat for the right team.”

  “It’s too late. I had to learn on my own.”

  “Anybody here you’re fond of?”

  We came out of the corn and stepped onto the lawn in front of the barn. I couldn’t look at the faded red planks of the barn without thinking of Teresa.

  “Yeah. There’s somebody,” I said.

  “I’d like to meet her. Why don’t you invite her out for pancakes?”

  I thought about it for a moment. “Does he have to come?” I asked. It sounded cruel and Whit visibly cringed. “Fine,” I said, “but don’t let him bore her to death. Your job is to stop him from mentioning quarks.”

  “That and a stack of buckwheats.” He patted his flank, then gave me a gentle shove and turned back toward the cornfield. “I’ll go get the general,” he said. “Meet you back at the genius school.”

  I walked across the lawn to the main house. It was still early; breakfast was just getting started in the dining room. I decided to invite both Toby and Teresa. I tapped Toby on the shoulder.

  “Pancakes,” I said. “Want to come?”

  “Who’s paying?” he said, his face turned up.

  “My dad. Teresa’s coming as well.”

  “Never mind, then. You don’t need me.”

  “Just come, you moron.”

  He stood, pushed his chair in, and took my elbow. We walked over to Teresa, who was hunched in her army surplus jacket, reading a book about witchcraft.

  “My dad’s here and he wants to take us out for pancakes. Do you want to come?” I asked.

  “Can I smoke cigarettes?” she said.

  “Sure you can,” Toby said. “You can even smoke pot if you want. I hear Nathan’s dad gets stoned all the time. Jesus. Are you crazy or just ins
ane? You don’t smoke in front of somebody’s dad.”

  “He probably won’t even notice if you smoke,” I said.

  We walked out of the dining room and down the hallway to where Whit and my father stood. My father, upon meeting Toby, extended his hand to him.

  “He can’t see,” I said. “Remember?”

  “Not at the moment anyway,” Toby said. “But we’re working on it.”

  “This is great,” Whit said, ushering us outside toward the Oldsmobile. “We’re going to have the most talented car in the Middle West.”

  My father looked at Teresa for the first time. I think it dawned on him that I had passed through puberty without him noticing. “How do you do?” he said.

  “All right,” she said, limply shaking his hand.

  We drove into Selby and ate at Flo’s Pancake House. The locals had come in for Saturday brunch—hog farmers in denim overalls and T-shirts advertising pesticides, families with neatly dressed children. We sat at a booth near the front window. Whit and my father sat on one side, facing us. A waitress brought us menus. My father smiled and looked out into the street for some distraction. I could tell Whit had spoken with him.

  “What looks good?” my father asked the table.

  “I’m a bacon-and-eggs man,” Toby said. “Canadian if they have it.”

  “After my own heart,” Whit said. “But I’m thinking about a tall stack of pancakes. A tower of syrup.”

  “What would you like, Teresa?” my father asked.

  “Just coffee,” she said.

  My father nodded. She could have said bourbon and still he would have tried to appear unfazed. His casual mouth and approving head nods seemed rehearsed. The waitress appeared again and took our orders. When she left, my father began playing with his silverware, lifting the angle of his knife so that the edge of his side plate formed a fulcrum beneath it.

  “How’s the music?” Whit asked Toby. He’d obviously seen a physics application looming in the glint of my father’s fork and decided to steer us for safer waters.

  “Fine,” Toby said.

  “Never made it past the little lamb myself,” Whit said.

  “You’ve been up in space, right?” Toby asked. I wondered how he pictured space. Didn’t he live in the same perpetual void?