The Beautiful Miscellaneous

by Dominic Smith

  We walked through the dark house, quietly, touching the worktables and supply cupboards with the arc of the flashlight. I took out a cigarette, lit it, and took several sips from my beer. Teresa walked to the other side of the cityscape and pulled something from one of the cupboards—a small white candle in a brass holder. She took the matches and lit it. There was something elaborate and planned in that gesture of lighting the candle and it made me nervous. She stood behind St. Peter’s Basilica, the domes shadowing her stomach like clouds. I took a roll of canvas and unfurled part of it under the table.

  The candle stood on the edge of the main street, where the city abruptly dropped into dead space, and lightened the facades of the buildings, giving the illusion of the sun shifting through leaves. I watched as Teresa removed her sweatshirt. She stood in a tank top, something like defiance in her face. I was aware that I still had a boy’s body—slender arms, a flat chest, barely a shadow of stubble on my chin.

  “That has to be the ugliest suit in the world,” she said.

  “I know.”

  She kissed me, taking off my jacket and shirt. She tasted of grape punch.

  We leaned against the model city and it shook momentarily. I placed my hands on her shoulders and pulled her beneath the table. She took off her shirt and lay back on it. She drew my face down to her and kissed me again. We liked to make out in places of confinement—the straw-bale cubby, the cramped workshop, under her bed—burrowed in, our limbs enfolded. Hiding gave our kisses urgency. Even in my daydreams, when I saw us inhabiting some prosperous future together, living in some immensely lit mansion, our naked clambering took place in the closets and underneath the stairs.

  But tonight, even pressed beneath the table, I felt distracted. I pictured my father skulking inside the house, stupefied by his headache and his ungrateful son. Teresa whispered something through a sigh as I traced my fingers across the rise of her chest. She stared out the triple-hung windows, her head angled back. I followed her gaze out into the beryl-dark night. From the institute I could hear the low commotion of people standing, chairs sliding. The end of something. Prodigies going off to bed. In that house music and combustion had been reduced to algorithms, missing children had been dreamed back into reach, but it all seemed remote compared to the narcotic rush of a girl’s kiss. If only tonight I could feel that oblivion.

  Then Teresa’s voice split the darkness like the winking edge of a knife.

  “I need to tell you something,” she said.

  I stopped moving my hand across her body. “Go ahead.”

  She wouldn’t look at me and her breath was all around us. She said, “It’s in your father’s head. The size of a plum. They don’t know it’s there.”

  My father had not been to a doctor since childhood. Mechanics, he called them.

  She said, “I wasn’t sure the first time I met him when he dropped you off. But then I saw another flash when we went for pancakes. And then tonight, I’m sure. I see it clearly.”

  I felt the air go out of me.

  She said, “I could be wrong. But I doubt it.”

  I managed to say, “A plum?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I sat up slowly and reached for my shirt. Voices lifted from outside. Then the sound of car tires on the gravel drive.

  “I’m really sorry,” she said.

  I crawled out from under the table and stood up slowly. I felt faint and leaned against the table. I said, “Maybe you’ve made a mistake.”

  She got up and looked at me and neither of us spoke for a long time. It was dark and all I could see were the whites of her eyes. She said, “I don’t think so.”

  I buttoned my shirt and went outside. Teresa followed. We walked in silence to the main house. Inside, the crowd had thinned to a clutch of tipsy parents and aunts. We went and stood by our parents and Whit. They sat in folding chairs, chatting about curbside recycling programs, whether cardboard needed to be bound in twine. Whit and Mr. Fenmore consulted their watches; it was getting late. My father stared down at his shoes. I knew in my gut that Teresa was right and now I couldn’t look at anything except the back of his head. Buried inside was a blush of rampant cells, a bedlam of neurons. The ghost particle, I thought. It’s been waiting here all along.

  twenty-nine

  The weight of the news tortured me for a week before I told my father in early April 1988. Several times, after the talent show, I called home and almost told my mother. I knew she had a right to know. But each time I heard her recount the domestic dramas of life with my father—his hallway wanderings in the small hours, the surges of discordant jazz from his study, the way he drank milk straight from the carton—I knew this had to be done in person. And I felt like I owed it to my father to be the one to tell him.

  Just before Easter my parents and Whit took Teresa and me to Des Moines to a new planetarium that had just opened. We drove an hour to sit under a domed ceiling and watch planets and stars angle across our universe. Whit called it “a chapel beneath the stars,” as he chauffeured us along I-80. The outing had been his idea. I sat up front with him while my parents sat with Teresa between them in back. I heard them exchange comments about vacation plans and the unseasonably cold weather. Teresa was flying to Chicago that night to be with her family.

  We arrived midafternoon in downtown Des Moines. The sky was cloud-capped, an expanse of bleached gray. We drove past storefronts decorated for Easter—an appliance store with baskets lining the window, a Mexican restaurant with festive lights blinking. Some families were out window-shopping in front of a department store. Whit honked and waved at them as we waited at a stoplight. One of the fathers waved back heartily. We drove in circles trying to find the planetarium. Whit assured us that he’d called ahead, that it was definitely a going concern.

  Eventually we parked in front of a Methodist church. Catty-corner stood the planetarium. It was housed in an old brick theater whose roof had been replaced with an aluminum dome. A metal bubble set between 1920s office buildings made for a strange sight. We bought our tickets at an old-fashioned booth and were ushered inside. It was moderately busy, mostly families with younger kids. There was a concession stand with popcorn. Teresa and I stared at each other. It was the perfect outing for seven-year-olds. Whit stood in line and bought two buckets of popcorn. When he returned he handed a bucket to Teresa and said, “I hear they show the Big Bang. That’s got to be a popcorn occasion, don’t you think?” He went and stood with my father. Teresa came toward me, out of earshot of my parents. “Your parents were putting me to sleep in the car,” she said. Normally I would have found this comment funny, might have offered a rejoinder about Whit’s conversational habits, but today I found it callous. I suspected that people didn’t exist for Teresa once she had named their maladies; they were reduced to damp lungs and spackled organs in Tulsa and Jersey City. I took a handful of popcorn and turned away.

  Inside, we sat in a small auditorium with movie-style seats. There were two banks of them, mounted on raised platforms, facing each other. The seats were reclined so as to leverage their view of the domed ceiling. The small crowd divided itself somewhat evenly as ethereal music piped in from somewhere. I sat by my father; I didn’t know exactly when it would strike me, but I wanted to be sure he was right there. He rested his head on the back of the seat, fatigued. I tried to make conversation with him and for a moment I sensed what it was like to inhabit his mind. I really just wanted to stare up at the white dome, to wait for constellations to appear, but instead I made myself communicate. Was this the weight he carried? Was it a resistance to reaching out, or simply that the view inside his head was so much better?

  “How’s college?” I asked.

  He lifted his head from the back of the seat, turned a little toward me. “Fine. I’m teaching an independent studies course on quantum mechanics. The students are quite bright.” His manner changed, as if he was caught off guard by my taking the lead in the parent-child dynamic. He sat up, crossed his legs
. “Everything’s coming along for you?”

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “Last year of school. Then it will be college.”

  “I should be hearing from the schools soon,” I said.

  “They take their sweet time.”

  A silence.

  He said, “I’m sorry about what I said at the talent show. It’s your memory. You can do with it what you want.” These were not his words, but paraphrases of things my mother had said.

  “I didn’t really mean to recite a TV show. It just came to me. It’s like comfort food for my brain,” I said.

  At that moment the music swelled and the lights dimmed. With each increment of darkness a small speck of light appeared in the dome. A swarm of dots became the Milky Way as the entire image of the cosmos rotated above us. A deep, ministerial voice commanded the air. This is your universe today. But it was not always so… An asteroid spun toward us. Meteorites arced earthward. Cloud swirls drifted beneath Earth’s opalescent atmosphere. Then everything faded until a single speck remained. The moment before the Big Bang… My father craned his neck and said, “The first hydrogen bomb.” The narrator spoke of the universe’s first explosion in a tone better suited for a particularly bloody battle of World War II—opposing forces give rise to a cataclysmic event…A white-orange flare, then a blue afterburn, as matter rushes into the void. Compressed gases…nitrogen…carbon…life emerges on a piece of cooled aftermath… The music changed suddenly to harps and lutes, birds calling through a synthesized chord. I saw Whit, mouth ajar, unblinking, his hand limp in the popcorn bucket.

  There were numerous opportunities for me to divulge the cancerous growth that loomed inside my father’s head. There was even a kind of poetry that I could appreciate by doing it under the starlit dome, perhaps as the supernova was reducing itself to cosmic dust. But I said nothing and we watched intently as the story of our universe unfolded. Then, as we were leaving, my mother and Teresa went to the restroom and Whit and I waited with my father. I glanced at Whit and he saw, I think, that I was on the verge of something. He excused himself and went out into the parking lot. My father stood in front of a poster that read COMING ATTRACTION: LIFE ON EARTH.

  “What did you think?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “Very bright and loud. Mostly misguided facts. Entertaining enough.”

  “I kind of liked it. It almost made me appreciate why you like physics so much.”

  “That was Hollywood physics,” he said.

  Average number of neurons in the brain: 100 billion

  We drifted for the empty concession stand.

  “I’ve been meaning to have a talk with you, son,” he said.

  “You have?”

  “I know I haven’t always taken an active interest in all parts of your life.”

  “What do you mean?” Had the spinning celestial bodies loosened something in him?

  “I don’t always notice the right things…”

  “It’s okay. I know your mind doesn’t—”

  He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I like Teresa very much. You make a good team.” It was Whit-esque—the word team. But the sentiment was his. He leaned against the concession stand. A giant bag of unsold popcorn lay on the counter next to the open and empty register. He looked at it for a moment, puzzled.

  “Look,” he said, “somebody takes the popcorn home when it doesn’t sell.” It was the same look he gave in hospitals and in supermarkets—baffled by the props from other lives and economies; the neon sprawl of the cereal aisle, the neat bandage on a wound. People got sick and required treatment, popcorn was salvaged from movie theaters; for my father these were insoluble mysteries, infinitely more arcane than the warping of time.

  “She likes you, too,” I said.

  “Good.”

  “Yeah.”

  He rubbed his head and said, “The headaches are getting worse. The other day I would have taken a lobotomy in lieu of breakfast.”

  I looked away, down the corridor, where I saw my mother and Teresa emerge from the ladies’ room and move slowly toward us. They both looked at us.

  “Teresa has seen something inside your head,” I said. “Which explains your headaches.”

  My father stood still, turned his back to my approaching mother. “I see.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “Is her gift, how should I say—empirical?”

  “She’s diagnosed dozens of people.”

  “I know there’s something in there. That’s the thing. Nathan, I hate to admit it, but I can feel it. Someone is sticking a finger through the back of my head. That’s not a scientific explanation. That’s the patient’s interpretation. Am I already a patient?”

  Something in him knew.

  “It’s a tumor,” I said.

  He puckered his mouth and nodded almost imperceptibly. “Wow,” he said. “This is what Whit calls out of left field.”

  Quietly, I said, “It’s big. The size of a plum.”

  He scratched the back of his head, then put his hands into his pockets. He pulled out a key chain and several quarters and looked at them, absorbing their dimensions. “A quarter seems manageable to me. Not so sure about a plum. That seems very large.”

  His lips thinned and his jaw tightened. I felt like my chest was about to cave in.

  “This is definitely not good,” he said. He slowly placed his coins and key chain back in his pockets as my mother and Teresa stood beside us. My father looked at the ground, then at my mother’s face. I took Teresa by the hand and moved for the exit. We opened the glass doors and stepped outside. It was getting dark. The window-shoppers had quit the street. I turned back to face the concession stand and saw my parents through the glass doors. My father leaned back against the counter, steadying himself, his arms by his side. My mother, her back to me, pulled a cardigan around her shoulders, seemingly braced. The pink neon popcorn sign burned a halo effect around the scene. My father fidgeted with the change in his pockets, trying to find the words. Finally he lifted his eyes from the carpet. Then my mother took a small step backward and I knew he’d told her. It registered in her whole body; her shoulders, her hands, everything tightened, then uncoiled. People filed past them, oblivious. Strangers coming out into the dusk, bundling into coats and holding hands and reaching for car keys, but moving slowly, still a little dazed by the pinwheel of stars.

  thirty

  The decline was rapid. The tumor had burrowed deep and slow, fissured the stem and cortex—the root cellar of the brain. Clustered cells, aggregating slowly, an inch a decade. But once discovered, it grew rapaciously. The brain-scan images blotted and rippled; the tumor was a nebulous cloud, a darkening whorl. It was buried too deep in the brain to operate. My father complained of blind spots, numbness in his fingers.

  For a while after the diagnosis he retained his burning questions, was able to continue teaching. Then, just as winter can arrive in a single afternoon, the light was driven from him. His pensive air, the abiding speculation about the nature of reality, his jotting down of Greek-letter equations that tracked the permutations of force and momentum, all disappeared.

  As the tumor grew, my father became a mockery of himself. In place of passivity and long silences, he was quick-witted and sarcastic. He contradicted himself within the same sentence, laughed at misfortune and cruelty. My mother banned him from newspapers and NPR news because she tired of his rejoinders to armed robberies and plane crashes. “Nobody asked you to get on that plane, did they? No. That was a contract you signed with the super-symmetric.” Before full-blown cancer, the quirks and anomalies of the Newtonian and quantum worlds were ineffable but benign, now they were indictments, the pranks of some cosmic and acerbic wit.

  All of it happened within a month. After the planetarium he returned home and underwent a battery of tests. My mother called not long after and asked me to come home. She said, “We need to start saying good-bye.”

  I arrived by bus into my hometown a little after midnight. It was ra
ining and windy. My parents sat parked in front of the station with the hazard lights on. I could see the outline of my sleeping father in the passenger seat. He had a blanket around him. My mother opened her door and helped me put my bags in the trunk.

  “You should have gone home. The bus is an hour late,” I said.

  “Your father insisted. He fell asleep just a little while ago.”

  She closed the trunk and embraced me, then we got in the car. The stuffy interior smelled of my father’s talcum powder; I wanted to roll the window down but didn’t. The radio murmured with classical music. Suddenly I wanted Whit to be there, longed for his chipper demeanor. We rode home fifteen miles under the speed limit—not because it was rainy and slick but because, I think, this was my mother’s way of shielding us, this one act of extreme caution. Slow-driving was her way of saying there was enough risk in our lives, that even driving six miles or toasting bread or stepping out of the shower would now require caution. Life was coming undone.

  We arrived home and I woke my father inside the garage. He jerked and reeled at me.

  “You frightened me,” he said loudly.

  “We’re home,” I said.

  I took his blanket, but he brushed me aside when I held out my hand. We made our way to the kitchen. Our house immediately felt familiar—the waxy smell of old furniture, the coralline hues of book spines. We sat in the kitchen and my mother made us tea. My father sat in a wooden rocker and rubbed his bare feet.

  “Bones ache like teeth,” he said.