Origins of the Universe and What It All Means

by Carole Firstman

  Five

  The day after my father’s phone call I began packing his books. The volumes on his list represent only a fraction of his library, so although I knew generally where to look in each room for specific titles, I opened all the blinds and doors to allow as much light into the house as possible. February’s winter chill wafted in from the front and back yards, and although I intended to work quickly and with big body movements in order to stave off the cold, I found myself lingering, occasionally pausing to open certain books. At first my curiosity was random—pull a book, crack it open, notice a word or two, slide it into the open banker’s box on the floor. I lifted The Rites of Passage, originally published in 1908, reprinted in 1960. The pages smelled of dust, of moisture. I read. Pondered. Reached for the dictionary to look something up, then the encyclopedia, then back to The Rites of Passage, then reached for something else, losing myself in a linked meandering of then-and-then, piling open books on the carpet around me rather than filling the cardboard box.

  My digressive thread—liminality: The condition of being on a threshold or at the beginning of a process. To be in “limbo,” says anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, is to inhabit an intermediate, ambivalent zone. In liminal phase an individual experiences a blurring of social environment and reality, occupies the in-between stage. The term derives from the Latin limen, which means boundary, transitional mark, passage between two different places. Liminal space represents a threshold of a physiological or psychological response, the place where you teeter between action and inaction, the moment you consider calling for help; the instant your eyes dart between the phone and the red spot spreading from your ankle; the window of time between your last inhalation and your first convulsion—and there it is, the sliver of time that precedes paralysis, a sliver so fine, so sharp it defies balance. You must step off, onto one side or the other. Go or stay; float or sink; here or there. Which way will you lean?

  And what can I say to ease your fear, dear father, alleviate your angst: one hundred and five, remember the plan? Or maybe I should give you a push instead, tell you to count backward from eighty-two and let your abdomen sink, rest on the smooth glass bottom. When the lid turns to seal the portal, the flood will feel so, so good. Liminality: The psychological point beyond which a sensation becomes too faint to be experienced.

  By noon, the liminal hour between morning’s lingering chill and afternoon’s oncoming warmth, the neighborhood outside my father’s silent front door chirped with sounds of life. I looked up from whichever book I held and walked to the window. Two young mothers from around the block pushed strollers side by side in the street as a preschooler rode his bicycle alongside them on the sidewalk, his rear tire balanced unsteadily but safely between two spinning plastic training wheels. I imagine that if that little boy were to fall, if the training wheels failed to keep him upright, he would not hesitate to cry out for help, and his mother would rush to his aid, either tilting the bike upright to get him back on track or scooping him up off the ground should he topple to the concrete.

  I remember the first time I rode a two-wheeler, a secondhand blue-and-white Schwinn my parents had picked up at Leroy’s Thrift Store in Pomona the winter of my first-grade year. I don’t recall my father being present for that particular rite of passage, the day I learned to ride a bike. He wasn’t the type to ride bikes, play ball, or attend Open House at my elementary school, but preferred instead to hole up in his study alone, or engage a few of his students in deep intellectual debate while smoking pot under the fig tree in our backyard. Lana was there the day of my inaugural lesson, though, along with a gaggle of neighborhood kids. One of the tall boys from the apartments across the street instructed me while the other kids huddled around. We stood at the interior end of my parents’ driveway, a long concrete corridor shaded by thick mulberry trees and the slatted-wood carport covering, a structure my father had built the preceding fall. The tall boy braced the bike upright as I climbed into place and rested my feet on the pedals. The other kids all shouted instructions at me as I sat on the wide leather seat, still unmoving, still braced, aimed toward sunny Ninth Street at the other end of the dark driveway.

  “Ready?” the tall boy asked.

  I didn’t answer right away. I paused. A moment of indecision.

  The kids’ voices swirled past my ears, making little sense to me at that moment—advice on which way to lean, how to grip the handlebars, how pressing backward on the pedals would engage the coaster brake. One voice I did hear, though. “We’ll catch you if you fall,” someone said.

  “All set?” the boy asked again.

  I nodded.

  On the count of three the boy gave me a push. At first I teetered, overcorrecting the handlebars several times, wrenching them side to side. But as I gained forward momentum I finally straightened out the front wheel. I found the sweet spot, the arrowlike glide. Balance. Exactly in between left and right. Lean. Let up. Lean. My friends ran alongside as I rolled toward the light, still solely propelled by the force of the tall boy’s push, through the darkened corridor toward the bright open space where the sidewalk divided our place from everyplace else, a concrete boundary separating Insulated-In-Here from Risk-Laden-Out-There.

  I think it was Lana who finally screamed for me to pedal.

  I pumped my right foot down, then my left. The bike burst forward, powered past the voices and scampering feet, and sailed into the open, wide street hot with sunlight and possibility.

  Six

  My father’s absence that afternoon is representative of so many absences, a single line item in my catalogue of his inattentive moments and self-sequestered years. Even when he was around, he wasn’t really around.

  The day of my birth (which, coincidentally, fell on his thirty-sixth birthday) marked the beginning of our shared lives. Over the years, I’ve pieced together the story of my tenuous origin. My father often tells the part about racing my mother to the hospital before dawn the morning of his birthday, the second of June. When my mother started to crown right there in the elevator, the nurses ushered her directly into the delivery room. He paced the waiting room with bated breath, his mind wild with possibilities, good and bad. On one hand, he says, he was eager for the baby, the skin and bone manifestation of his DNA, his contribution to humankind’s evolution. On the other hand, he wrestled with worry and guilt about how the baby might turn out.

  My father admits that when they first learned of my mother’s pregnancy he wasn’t at all happy. Something had to be done. “There are doctors that handle this,” he said to my mother. What he still doesn’t know is that on the day of her scheduled pregnancy termination, my mother returned home without having gone to the clinic. My mother tells me she lied to my father, claiming she’d received a hypertonic saline injection but the six-week embryo didn’t abort. “I guess we’re stuck,” she told him.

  Seven and a half months later, my father paced the delivery waiting room and wondered how that super-salt shot might have mangled the gestating fetus. Would this baby be physically deformed or mentally affected? A hell of a price to pay, he thought.

  Finally the doctor emerged from the delivery room, smiley-faced at twenty-two minutes past six: “It’s a girl,” he said. “Congratulations, Bruce.”

  At my mother’s bedside, my father carefully balanced my head in the fleshy crook of his folded arm, and when he had counted all ten fingers for the third time, his eyes watered and he told my mother how perfect we both were, she and me.

  My father usually omits from his recounting that within days of bringing me home, my baby noises were too much of a distraction to his studies, so he erected a tent for my mother and me in the backyard, the large army-green canvas shelter they’d used on my father’s scorpion-gathering expeditions in the Mexican desert. I know this may be hard to believe, but I shit you not, dear reader. There on the dry Bermuda grass, with a lawn chair inched to the edge of a Woolworth’s plastic wading pool, a pair of foot-high camping cots, and a floor fan po
wered by an extension cord stretching back to the house, my nineteen-year-old mother tended me during the days, her red-faced newborn, cooing, crying, nursing, and sleeping through the summer heat.

  The photos from that time, at least as I remember them, paint a deceptively simple picture. I’ve seen only a few snapshots from those days, and it has been many years since I’ve seen them, so the image in my mind is a bit fuzzy. All appears relatively serene through the camera lens—a hippie-ish scene with my mother smiling from behind the frames of her cat-eye glasses; my father bare-chested and barefoot in dress slacks cut off above the knee. I imagine them taking turns holding their new infant there in the yard, snapping a camera loaded with a fresh roll of Kodak slide film and sipping sun tea flavored with fresh lemon wedges picked from the side yard. He probably took several little breaks like this over the course of the day, walking back and forth from the living room to the yard. Then in the evening, when the sun sank beneath the neighborhood’s drooping power lines, my mother joined my father in the house for spaghetti and sliced cantaloupe. My mother slept with me inside the house at night and returned to the backyard campsite each morning.

  No, he wasn’t exactly cruel, at least not intentionally. He just wasn’t all that interested in fatherhood. Many people don’t really want to be parents; rather, parenthood sort of happens to them. We all deal with it in our unique ways. Some of us learn to balance personal need with responsibility and end up enjoying it. Others meet their responsibilities and mask their disdain, sometimes successfully, other times not. Perhaps it’s a manifestation of the Asperger’s, but my father rarely camouflages his intentions. If he doesn’t want children he simply says so—to me, to anyone, with neither hesitation nor vexed emotional tone—then tells his pregnant wife to make an appointment at the clinic. If the crying baby bothers his reading, again he simply says so, then rummages through the garage until he finds the tent poles. Does this prove him one or the other, either a good or bad father? In isolation, no, I don’t think so. But when does the cumulative factor enter the algorithm? On one side of the equation, he missed pretty much all of my rites of passage. Never did he attend (or even know about, in most cases) a parent conference, open house, graduation, swim meet, driving lesson, birthday party, marching parade, or music recital.

  On the other side of the equation, I remember the morning he rushed to my rescue during the San Fernando earthquake of 1971—which rumbled from its epicenter fifty miles northwest of Pomona—just weeks after I’d learned to ride my bike, the same year he would capture the scorpion I have recently stolen. Asleep in the top bunk in my bedroom (I’m not sure why we had bunk beds at that time, as my brother would have been less than a year old and still sleeping in a crib in my parents’ room), I was awakened by the clank-clank-clank of the head- and footboards rattling erratically. I sank my head deeper into the pillow and drifted back to sleep for maybe a second or two, incorporating the side-to-side rocking motion of the bunk bed into the dream I’d been having, until the noise in my dream thumped louder, then took on weight, cannoning past the pit of my stomach. My eyes slammed open with instantaneous focus. The whole bunk bed teetered away from the wall. The force threw me against the outer guardrail, which stopped me from rolling off the edge. Then abruptly the bed swung back the other way, ramming against the wall so hard it popped the guardrail up and out of its shallow niche, hurling it across the room like a giant scorpion tail in full attack. The top bunk arched away from the wall again, farther out this time. Without hesitation I sat straight up, turned away from the wall and leaned back, against the bed’s outward momentum. If the bed had been the front tire of a wobbly bike, my body was the handlebar: Lean. Let up. Lean. Back and forth the bunk frame shuddered while tiny bits of plaster rained from the ceiling. Just as the window next to my headboard pinged, then cracked, my father burst through the door in his underwear. He pushed the bed up against the wall with all his weight. He wedged himself at an angle, a human plank, with arms outstretched, palms pushing upward against my mattress, his bare toes curled into the rug for traction.

  “I gotcha,” he said.

  We rode out the earthquake like that, him leaning into the bunk frame, me leaning backward into the wall. I had no idea at the time, and wouldn’t fully understand until years later, that during those moments the world outside our house crumbled. I didn’t know what Richter 6.6 meant or that sixty-five people would die that day. While twelve bridges fell onto highway lanes, two hospitals collapsed, an entire medical center heaved off its foundation, and the lower section of the Van Norman Dam crumbled, my father and I found the sweet spot, the upright balance, if only for a few slow-motion seconds. We managed to leverage our bodies against the shifting continent below us. While the Earth’s crust transitioned—buckled and split and sank—my father and I inhabited a fleeting moment of limbo. We countered the vibrations pulsing through the wood floor on its raised, hollow foundation.

  While my shoulder blades thumped against the wall, I watched over my father’s bare shoulder as the crack in the window grew longer and more complex, ascending upward at a slight diagonal and splintering off like a windblown bush, or a tree permanently etched on the horizon.

  Forty years later, I looked through the screened window of my father’s vacant home some three hundred miles north of my childhood Pomona house, going through his things. Outside, the little boy continued riding his bike down the sidewalk, his plastic training wheels pinging with grit and gravel fragments. He pumped the pedals hard several times, then turned his head to look at his mother as he glided past her. She didn’t seem to notice his daring feat, deep in conversation with her friend, so he hooted, “Look at me!”

  She turned and raised her fist in way-to-go encouragement.

  I moved to my father’s desk in the office, a converted room at the back of the house. There I found seven old specimen jars with spiders, mites, crabs, and scorpions. One jar had long ago shattered in place; the spider, no longer preserved, lay dried and crumbled amid shards of glass. It occurred to me then, not for the first time, how little I understand of my father, yet how quickly time narrows the boundaries of our shared earthy existence—soon he’ll be gone. It’s not the chronology of his life that evades me. I know much of what he did and when, despite the fact that he was intermittently absent from my life until he moved to my town, my neighborhood, a few years ago. Although I’ve read much about the high-functioning edge of the autism spectrum—the lack of empathy, intense preoccupation with a particular subject, onesided verbosity, impaired emotional reciprocity—part of me still can’t understand why his work was so important to him, why his intellectual life took precedence over our family.

  Wait. I take that back. Truth be told, I actually do understand why he is the way he is. What I wonder is why I ended up with such a parent.

  Seven

  Over Thanksgiving dinner in my living room last November, he said again—in the exact same words, same intonation, same cadence as the hundred times before—how lucky we are to exist at all. How fortunate we humans are to be alive, let alone sentient. While the rest of us at the table talked about mundane things—about road construction blocking the downtown freeway exit, and which alternative route might be best over the next few weeks—he interrupted with his own train of thought.

  “The probability of the existence of your individual, unique genome is about one over a googolplex,” he blurted to no one in particular, but looked at my mother-in-law.

  “Oh,” she said, not knowing how else to respond. She reached for her soda and puckered her lips around the straw.

  “Do you know what a googolplex is?” he said to everyone, but looked at me.

  “No,” I said on cue.

  “Do you want to know?”

  “Sure.” Still on cue.

  “It can be represented in a mathematical equation.”

  The table thus quieted, he lifted a pen and three-by-five-inch notepad from his breast pocket. He wrote: 10(10) (100). “Or it can be
written out as a number. A googolplex is the second largest number with a name. It’s a one, followed by a googol of zeros.”

  He paused.

  “Do you know how much a googol is?” he finally asked.

  My cue again. “How much?”

  He explained that a googol is the number ten raised to the hundredth power, which is presumed to be greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe. A googolplex, then, is the number ten to the power of googol. It would be impossible for a person to print all the zeros in a googolplex because there isn’t enough space in the known universe. And it would take more than a googol years for that person to write out all those zeros. “It’s impossible to visualize how big a googolplex is,” he said.

  My mother-in-law said nothing, just nodded politely and pushed the mashed potatoes with her fork.

  “You had a one-in-a-googolplex chance of being here today,” he said.

  Very long pause. We all teetered on the threshold of awkward silence. I wondered if I should let the moment settle, or if I should say something to alleviate the social pain I imagined my guests felt. Let it die, or rescue it?