by Chris Eaton
Before they left California, Chris Eaton’s father had worked as the Assistant Director of Caltrans, the government agency responsible for road mobility across the State, the pride of all state agencies, credited with designing the font used in road signs nationwide for over fifty years, as well as being the innovators behind reflective, raised dots as lane dividers instead of painted lines. By the eighties, he was responsible for the ongoing maintenance and safety on over 50,000 lane miles of roadway, 12,000 bridges, 250,000 acres of roadside including 25,000 landscaped acres, 88 roadside rest stops, 350 vista points, 340 park-and-ride lots, 310 pumping plants and more than 400 maintenance yards. It was his job to ensure that all of the connections remained as connections, that society did not crumble in the face of weather and time, and that everything continued to make sense, at least from a strictly utilitarian point of view. His role – and, indeed, his great engineering talent – was in seeing how so many seemingly unrelated pieces fit together and to plan for the most likely eventualities.
That’s when he became interested in earthquakes, after the 1989 tremors that stunned baseball fans across the country during the World Series game between San Francisco and San Diego, and began to follow the writings of Jim Berkland, who had predicted the incident four days before it happened. Berkland employed a system of measurements and calculations to which Chris Eaton’s father could entirely relate, bringing together as many “unrelated” bits of information as possible until it began to take shape: tide levels, the lunar perigee, even strange animal behavior, measured chiefly by the number of runaway pet ads and beached whales in a predetermined period. Over the next two and a half years, as Chris Eaton’s father followed Berkland’s predictions fanatically, the retired geologist accurately predicted nearly eighty percent of the globe’s major and minor quakes, always several days before they struck.
To be of use in his own work, Chris Eaton’s father had to predict events much further in advance, with more of a regional focus, so he took Berkland’s findings and cross-referenced them with other measures of local synchronicity and aggression, like the penalty minutes taken by the Los Angeles Kings in home games versus away, the differential between the price of gas at competing stations, the position of the banana ice cream tub at his local frozen dairy, the number of times he came across people with his name, or the number nine, all of which he included in a paper on seismic retrofitting for many of the state’s surviving elevated roadways and bridges (replacing obsolete, riveted lattice beams with heat-treated bolt lattice, and adding ductile steel restraints to expansion rockers using friction clamps), roundly applauded for its size and complexity but for those same reasons also went largely unread, and – most unfortunate of all – his recommendations were not adopted until immediately following the quake he’d predicted for Northridge in ‘94. Fifty-one people were killed, 9263 were injured, and large portions of Interstate 10, Interstate 5, and California State Highway 14 had to be entirely rebuilt, taking nearly two years to replace, and to add insult to injury, his Director was replaced and focus shifted from maintenance entirely to new construction, so Chris Eaton’s father jumped at a job offer from Florida, where they were experiencing a road crisis of their own, under the weight of so many obese, two-fisted tourists and pensioners – that is, until the pressure of being a prophet of disaster became too great to bear, and his mind alighted from his frantic pursuit of the gaps in symbolic order to one particular cut in the real: the alarming byproducts of the parasitic hospitality industry, the business of competitive pampering, the American Automobile Association reserving its Three, Four and Five Diamond rankings for facilities that would go that extra mile, providing their guests with such unnecessary luxuries as single-serving shampoos and conditioners, paper doilies around the in-room water glasses and, according to the rules set out in its own guide, “Two bars of soap greater than ¾ oz.” Two new bars of soap. Every day. Even for guests who remained for more than one night. All of those bars of soap were tossed in the dumpsters out back, and then carted to the landfill. And the sheer number of them skewed his calculations to distraction until, on one of his inspections up north, he just kept driving until he reached the groomed grass and asphalt of Alexandria, Virginia, and using a slight modification of US Patent #4310479 (wherein soap scrap material resulting from the formation of the soap bars is reintroduced into the process by adding it into the final extrusion device), combined with US Patent #4296064 (a method for recycling soap chips in a particular structure including a container having a removable rack having four compartments and a heating element, the method comprising, placing the soap chips in the compartment, heating the soap chips, cooling the soap chips, removing the rack from the container and emptying out formed soap bars), Chris Eaton’s father registered a device that could be used to collect waste soaps from the hotel industry, re-render them and sell the new recycled bars back for profit.
At the annual soap convention in Orlando, the big producers practically laughed him out of the hotel. But with new garbage collection laws that penalized businesses for any excess waste, he was able to approach one hotel at a time with a simple proposition: to reduce the waste of a hundred-room hotel (operating at 75% capacity) by nearly half a tonne every year, undercutting the government penalties and carting the bars away in a leased van that he would return reeking permanently of lilacs and lavender. The first letter from Procter & Gamble arrived shortly after Chris Eaton’s father signed the contract with Disney. Phone calls from Amway and Unilever followed soon after. They had taken some interest in his curious invention after all, and wished to discuss the possibility of purchasing it from him. He refused. If they’d really been so interested, they could have purchased it at the convention. Now it was too late. Of course he had no idea who he was dealing with. The major manufacturers had been fighting a war over the lucrative soap markups for decades. Before the eighties, P&G had held a near monopoly over North American cleanliness for as long as anyone could recall. Then, just as Chris Eaton’s father was graduating from college, the real war for soap supremacy began. Unilever created what they dubbed a beauty bar, made with extra moisturizing ingredients to prevent the dry skin often caused by harsher soaps, and by 1986, Dove had become the top-grossing soap in the world.
When Chris Eaton’s father came on the scene, both companies had already lost a significant amount of the hotel business to soap makers in India, Singapore and the Philippines, so they were not about to lose out to an engineer from Florida who three years earlier was trying to predict earthquakes with tea leaves. They dropped their prices. They launched new campaigns that stressed the purity of their own product. Near Tallahassee, P&G created a special repository for used soap fragments, actually paying the hotels to collect the barely used bars and burying them deep underground where they could not be used again.
Chris Eaton’s father was not dissuaded. In fact, despite all of this, opportunities began to open up in several other states along the Eastern seaboard. Through Disney and old connections with Caltrans, he was able to set up facilities in California. Then the rumors started, that the flu-like symptoms that were cropping up in California were linked to bacteria in the recycled soap. Somehow, various innocent personal bacteria were mingling with chemicals in the recycling process and making people ill. It was a blatant lie. But the Florida and California legal systems refused to do anything about it. When one of his clients forwarded him a damning email from a P&G distributor, they apologized and settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. But the business never recovered. They were left with warehouses full of questionable product that they were never able to sell. And Chris Eaton’s father was never the same.
A few years later, Chris Eaton’s mother started suffering from severe weight loss. She complained of increased cramping, and frequent diarrhea, until one morning she discovered dark ochre blood in her stool. One of her husband’s military friends diagnosed her with piles, and prescribed an ointment. But the bleeding continued. Six weeks later and
thirty-two pounds lighter, she collapsed in line at the Gottschalks buying new underwear, the pair she was wearing spotted in red. At the hospital she was re-diagnosed, this time with pseudomembranous colitis. The wall of her bowel had begun to perforate and she’d started to enter major organ failure. She woke up with a quarter-sized hole in her abdomen and a rubber colostomy bag held in place by a seven-inch-wide fabric belt – her new rectum and port-a-potty. She made the best of it. She made jokes about how she was glad she’d already given up swimming. And she continued to look after her two children as best she could. Then, after the first bag failed, and they “tore (her) another asshole” (she’d never sworn before in her life), she was told she could no longer eat nuts or celery, coconut or citrus fruit, for fear of further blockage, and she basically told the world to fuck it. Still a teenager, Chris Eaton had to take over most of the errands because Chris Eaton’s mother was too embarrassed to leave the house.
PART 3
The first time Chris Eaton hit the water, everything stopped. He was just a child, a spastic three-year-old with wet towels for feet, head like an overgrown ape’s paw, his legs like welded bows, too fast for his body, so they just bounced up and down like the limbs of some delicate, drunken ostrich. He knew enough that he wasn’t supposed to run around the pool. That much he’d already learned. And he was not disobedient. But who could help it? He was still young enough to change form at will, and that day he was full of potential energy, with an imagination unrestricted by shame. Or knowledge. Or impossibility. He was the first seconds of an igniting lightbulb filament, he was a falling chestnut, he was a blade of grass in the rain. If he wanted to, he could have frozen the pool with his mind, could have leapt skywards and pissed rain down on all of them, could have taken out the entire line of soldiers tracking him from the opposite shore with one shot. If he wanted to.
But then he was in the water, completely unsure how he got there. And then there was nothing but the sound of bubbles rushing past his ears. He was too young to know the difference. Solids and liquids; liquids and gases. What did he care? The world looked like it had fractured into millions of pieces. There was a momentary illusion of flight. A feeling of heavenly aquatic weightlessness. A darkening peace.
He inhaled.
And he sank to the bottom.
Chris Eaton was a good boy, a bad boy, a good girl. Bad girl. Chris Eaton was so fast. Chris Eaton was so pretty. He was strong and fast and big and pretty. She could run and jump and stretch tall like this. Chris Eaton was precious. She was all the meaningless things you call a child when you’re too disinterested to properly engage, and more.
Chris Eaton was a fucking genius. Her IQ score was through the roof. Her mother, who had a Master’s degree in Sociology, taught her how to read long before she went to school, believing the curriculum was too soft, that children had so much more capacity to learn at an early age. So Chris Eaton always read at a level three grades higher. She knew all the tricks of the multiplication tables: numbers divisible by 2 were all even numbers; the digits in a number divisible by 3 would add up to a number that was also divisible by 3; likewise 9; numbers that fell into the sets of 2 and 3 would also be divisible by 6; the last digit in a number divisible by 7, when doubled and subtracted from the remaining digits of that number, will produce a number that is also divisible by 7. She could tell you the population of every country in Africa. She could name the capitals of all fifty states, in alphabetical order. She’d even mem0rized pi to twelve decimal points (3.1415926535897), which is the point at which all numbers except zero have been used at least once.
When she was first tested by Mensa at the age of eight, she made only two mistakes on the entire test:
21. Pear is to apple as potato is to?
Banana Peanut Strawberry Peach Lettuce
22. Which of the following is least like the others?
Poem Novel Painting Statue Flower
Her answers: Lettuce; Statue.
The correct answers: Peanut; Flower.
Of course, because she was only eight, and because her score was still remarkable, they explained to her where she had made her mistakes. In the first case, pear and apple are linked by the fact that they grow on trees. So the proper corresponding link to potato, which grows under ground, is the peanut. In the second question, the flower is quite simply the only object in the list that occurs naturally. It is not a man-made object of beauty.
Her answers, however, were no less correct, particularly after emerging from a lengthy sequence of math-based, quantitative solutions. She chose lettuce for reasons of length. Pear had four letters, apple had five, potato had six, and lettuce was the only word with seven. For her, it was simply the next in the sequence. Statue, she reasoned, was the only word in the second list that ended with a vowel. Even her choice on the next question, though correct, was chosen for similarly incorrect reasons:
23. Which of these is the odd one out?
Cat Dog Hamster Rabbit Elk
The answer was Elk. But the Mensa explanation was because it was the only non-domesticated animal in the list. Chris Eaton, once more, chose it because it was the only one that began with a vowel.
She was wise beyond her years. A visionary. The Mensa officiators didn’t know what to do with her. Her brain, she thought, must be the size of a fucking Zeppelin! They even thought about skipping her a grade, when her family came back to Arizona from Norway in Grade Five, but she was so tiny, as if merely living in Norway had shaped her outward appearance along with her inside, infecting her somehow with a sensitively hunched Scandinavian frame, and her teachers were worried she might get picked on. Small kids, most adults theorize, have difficulties maturing. Small kids cannot handle situations with more complex emotions. Small kids (or at least this is true for Chris Eaton) feel something burning behind their eyes at the slightest sign of confrontation, when a math competition is lost, or when a word is mispronounced out loud in front of the entire class, and someone starts to snicker, and the tears well up….
One day, Chris Eaton’s teacher took him aside and told him that he could be whatever he wanted, which is a horrible thing to say to a child with an overactive imagination. All he wanted out of life was to go to Heaven and get his picture in Rack Magazine. She laughed. And she told him she wanted him to write stories. A story a week. About topics she would assign him. For thirty-six weeks.
36 was divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6 and 9.
The stories ranged from Halloween horror to science fiction to intense battles with wild animals, usually inspired by a one- or two-sentence catalyst, such as Write a story about becoming invisible; call it “Unseen Self,” or Imagine two cats who confront magic, danger and death to rescue a missing friend, or Does Income Improve Health or Does Good Health Increase Income? He wrote an imagined history of rugby, and what it would be like to be a stock car racer, and work at an Internet help desk; he wrote a review of a skateboard video game, a complaint to a computer manufacturer, a short play called The Mummy, a love story about a civil war hero and some girl, one sci-fi piece about managing large systems and a second called “Pure Substances;” there was an emperor, and a barking goldfish, a brown bear, a koala and a young man on the western frontier, a bridge game, and angelic warriors without wings. And his friends gathered around him on the playground at recess and practically begged to hear more. The attention became an obsession that darkened his soul.
Once because it was President’s Day the card read: Imagine you went to battle with General Washington to fight for our Independence. What do you see? But of course his namesake – the first Chris Eaton in North America – had actually been there, right beside Washington at Brandywine, having already served his country’s rebel forces for nearly a year in Virginia and the Carolinas, then with General Arnold at White Plains, and for several months in the special units forces of General Rutherford near Charlotte. Rutherford ordered a detachment to march to the River Santee, where they captured several more Tories, and British, and two bo
ats. They then conveyed the twelve prisoners to the main army at Rugeleys Mills, where they remained for some weeks, during which time a detachment was sent to support General Sumter against the enemy toward the Catawba River. When they reached Sumter, they were informed he had defeated the enemy so they marched back to the headquarters at the mills. They then marched toward Camden. Yet he returned to Surry County (later renamed Stokes County) with no fireworks and no parade, and pockets full of continental money that had already depreciated to basic uselessness. Washington went on to be the country’s first president. And Christopher Eaton became a harness maker. The next year, he married. But because there was no record of a Chris Eaton before the war, the government tried to take his war pension away, even after several of his surviving compatriots testified on his behalf with verbal affidavits that are still maintained in official documents in Washington:
Aff. of John Venable, Stokes Co., NC, 15 Apr. 1834 – He is acquainted with Christopher Eaton and knows of his militia service. He was present at Gates defeat although Eaton did not serve in the same company with him.
