Origins of the Universe and What It All Means

by Carole Firstman

“Yes, that’s what you always say.” I’d heard it a million times. “What’s Marina interested in?”

  “She likes to cook and clean. She’s a wonderful cook, you know. Makes everything from scratch. And she keeps the house spotless, for which I am grateful. She treats me like a king. But she doesn’t have an intellectual bone in her body.”

  “What does she do when she’s not cooking and cleaning?” Marina kept the house immaculate, all right, everything scrubbed and polished to a shine. She waited on my father hand and foot like a servant, hunched over the stove, her face moist with perspiration, stirring and serving from the heavy iron pots, stepping back and forth from the stove to the table and back to the stove again, while my father inhaled his food. She did it all, like a maid-cook-servant, never sitting to eat until my father had had his fill, until he’d licked his plate with his tongue and followed it up with one last shot of tequila. More tortillas? she’d ask him in Spanish. Even after three decades of living in the States with my father, she would never learn to speak English with ease, for she and my father spoke only Spanish at home.

  “Well, she goes to the grocery store. Does laundry. That sort of thing.”

  “What about for fun?”

  “For her, that’s fun.”

  “That’s not fun,” I said.

  “She lives and breathes to serve my every need. That’s what makes her happy, for which I am eternally grateful. I suppose I couldn’t ask for a better wife.” He took in a deep breath. “Except that I wish she was interested in cosmology. And evolution and philosophy.”

  We watched another shooting star.

  “The Sun is a star at the center of the solar system,” he says. “It’s more than a hundred times bigger than Earth, and it’s made up mostly of hydrogen and helium.” He counted out each item on his fingers to make sure he got them all. “Hydrogen, helium, and trace amounts of oxygen, carbon, iron, neon, nitrogen, silicon, magnesium, and sulfur.”

  Thirty-Four

  When I reflect on that night now, I’m struck by my father’s intellectual ability to reverse-engineer the cosmos, making me the focus of a Carole-centric universe—a rendition that, to be honest, I find both comforting and annoying. The Big Bang theory is, after all, the latest in a litany of creation myths, humankind’s ongoing attempt to describe the ordering of the cosmos—we have, for example, creation-from-chaos stories like the Sumerians’ Eridu Genesis, and the Greeks’ Theogony of Hesiod; the Earth-driver type like the Cherokee story of the water beetle who formed the Earth from mud; emergence myths like the Mayan account of two gods, Kukulkan and Tepeu, who, after failing to create humans from mud, then wood, finally constructed man from maize; out-of-nothing explanations like the Judeo-Christian story of Genesis, or the collection of myths emanating from Ancient Egypt; world-parent tales like Rangi and Papa from the South Pacific, or the Hindu account of Mahapralaya and Svayambhu. Like my father, I could go on (and on and on), but my point is that we humans want to know where we came from. We want to know the origins of the universe. And for some of us, we want to know more about our family of origin. Where did I come from in the big and small scheme of things—I, the mysteriously generated organism that emanated from a long-ago crashing of atoms, but also I, the daughter of Bruce and Aranga Firstman.

  My father’s version of the origin of the universe intrigues me, not only because it includes me, by name even, and not only because it locates the temporarily clustered atoms that form the me I recognize in the mirror—the physical body I temporarily inhabit during this blip I call a lifetime—but also because this version accounts for the longevity of my atoms, the basic elements that spewed into existence billions of years before now, elements that will still exist long after my body’s gone: a form of immortality, I suppose—not quite as comforting as the notion of heavenly eternal life, but at least the element-recycling plot of the Big Bang storyline is, well, it’s something. Better than nothing.

  I admire the fact that my father, through his professional pursuits—researching the anatomical features of modern scorpions in order to support Darwin’s theory of evolution, thus contributing to the ongoing discourse of the creationist-evolutionist debate—adds to humankind’s inquiry of nature, science, and God. That’s big-potatoes stuff, the Strategy #2 approach in the Contents for Life conundrum.

  I find comfort in the fact that my father and I share the same DNA.

  If he can tackle big potatoes, then maybe I can, too.

  I’m annoyed by the fact that my father and I share the same DNA.

  If he can tackle big potatoes, then why didn’t Raising a Family make his big-potatoes list?

  Technically speaking, my father spent significantly more time with my half-sister, Liza, than he did with my brother and me. But the difference was in physical proximity rather than genuine day-to-day interest. Although my dad and Liza lived under the same roof for twenty years (until she died of cancer two days before her twentieth birthday), I don’t think he was much more involved in her upbringing than he was in my brother’s and mine. Children are seen and not heard. Children are the mother’s responsibility. Don’t bother me while I’m in my office at the far end of the house. Close the door on your way out.

  Fathering a child and raising a child are two very different things. Mating with a woman and being a husband are two very different things. (Recall our humanoid friend Chaka from Land of the Lost, how he went home, banged Mrs. Chaka, and probably his newly widowed sister-in-law, Mrs. Tuktuk, as well. Chaka mated. Judging from the behavior of most primates I’ve observed, I doubt he did much fathering.) On an intellectual level, I know it’s the Asperger’s that drives my father’s paternal disinterest. He’s hardwired this way. He can’t help it. On the other hand, relatively newfound medical labels are a weak salve for old emotional wounds.

  As my dad and I sat in the courtyard of that Mexican motel watching the meteor shower, as he spoke—or perhaps I should say, lectured—about crashing atoms and radioactive decay and anthropic principle, while we sipped red wine from thermos camping mugs, his apparent disinterest in the domestic activities going on around us mirrored his lifelong disregard for my own family of origin, my mother, my brother and me (and Marina and Liza, too); I never ranked as a big potato. On a personal, day-to-day level, he is and always has been the center of his own universe. So I’m unsatisfied with my father’s particular potato salad recipe.

  My own mixture of small and large potatoes might not be any better, though. Here I am, midlife: no kids; no symphonies; no correspondence addressed to me from Stephen J. Gould; strained relationships with my elderly parents; still searching for my spot on the spectrum of reconciliation as I pack and shuffle their Office Depot boxes from house to shed, from house to assisted-living apartment. Good daughter or bad? Who will clean out the contents of my house?

  Thirty-Five

  (2013)—

  My mother asks to see some of the old photographs in the box I’ve brought to her assisted-living apartment, so I give her a stack of four-by-six-inch glossies, a small portion from the Ecuador adventure she and I shared.

  “Here,” I say. “Galapagos and Amazon.”

  She holds them in her right hand, the only functional one now, which is doubly awkward because she’d been left-handed before the stroke. Keeping the stack in one hand, she shuffles through with her thumb and index finger for about twenty seconds, then fixes her gaze on the blanket wrapped around her feet. She’s already lost interest. The cognitive damage manifests itself, among other ways, in a short attention span. And deep depression.

  To keep her engaged, I ask if the photos are in chronological order. She fingers the stack and determines that no, they are not in order, and when I suggest she get them in order she snaps at me. “Carole, I can’t.”

  “You can.”

  “No, I can’t,” she says, her barbed words sharp with disdain.

  It would be easier for me to put the photos in order myself, or to simply drop them back into the box as is. But
I want my mother to redevelop her cognitive skills—not to mention her fine and gross motor skills—so that she might learn to do things for herself again. If only she could regain some independence, I tell myself, it would improve her quality of life on a grand scale. So I’m prompting her to help herself. She need not waste away in the recliner, pushing the call button around her neck each time she wants the blanket rearranged, the thermostat adjusted, or to go to the toilet. If she wanted to, she could get better. I want her to get better. Although she’s come so far in the last year, since the emergency room when I told her goodbye forever, this is not the ending I would have chosen for her life.

  Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books from the 1980s and ’90s? My third-grade students ate ’em up. I still have a few of those books stored in boxes in my attic—stuff I saved in case I decided to go back to teaching elementary school someday.

  It’s a series of interactive chapter books written from a second-person point of view where the reader assumes the role of protagonist in each adventure—the private investigator, the spy, the archeologist—and makes choices that determine the plot’s outcome. Typically, a substantial story setup comes to some sort of a pivot, a fork in the road. Every few pages, the protagonist faces two or three options, each of which leads to more options. You have to make a choice. Which will ultimately lead to more choices.

  If I remember correctly, it was my little friend Tyler (cannibalizing-scorpions illustrator extraordinaire: “Any questions?”) who suggested The Cave of Time for read-aloud period, when I’d read aloud for thirty minutes after lunch each day. The story details are fuzzy now, but I seem to recall the main character hiking in Snake Canyon for the first few pages, when...you find yourself lost in the strange, dimly lit Cave of Time. Inside, you find two passageways. One curves downward to the right, the other leads upward to the left. You realize that the one leading down may take you into the past, and the one leading up may go to the future. Which will you choose? If you take the left passage, turn to page twenty. If you take the right branch, turn to page sixty-one. If you take the third option, which is to turn around and step back outside the cave, go to page twenty-one. Whichever you choose, be careful. In the Cave of Time, you might end up face to face with a hungry Tyrannosaurus Rex, or be lured aboard an alien spaceship.

  This choice-leads-to-choice structure is consistent, but the choices are tricky because most of the time neither choice seems terribly more promising than the other—take the canoe or hike the hill? And yet, inevitably, one of those choices leads to an early ending: death for the really exciting books—or getting rescued by a police officer for the tamest. But either way, an ending.

  At my suggestion, my mother spreads the photos over the blanket on her lap. She groups them by category in little stacks: hoards of iguanas sprawled across volcanic rocks at the ocean’s edge; frigatebirds in flight, their outstretched wings black and angular and almost geometric the way they come to a knife-like point at each tip, circling above the sailing mast like prehistoric pterodactyls in search of prey; anacondas wrapped around tree branches, poised high above the nose of the dugout canoe in the photo’s foreground.

  The canoe. Our chosen mode of transportation in the Amazon. By day we paddled through brown muddy water in search of flora, fauna, and adventure. And later, in the dead of night, we ventured out for caiman. With a flashlight clutched between his teeth and the machete tucked in the waist of his shorts, the guide got out of the boat, walked barefoot through the waist-deep water, and picked up a two-foot-long baby caiman. Its eyes reflected the light and its vertical pupils narrowed to knife-thin slits. “You touch?” the guide asked.

  In my book, a baby caiman, even with its hideous mouth clenched tight by the guide, ranks right up there with snakes. No can do.

  But I did. I touched a baby caiman with my index finger, for the briefest moment.

  Why? To orchestrate my own adventure, I suppose. To say I did it and lived to tell about it.

  Still, I worried. I squirmed, involuntarily, tipping the boat side to side. How many teeth does a momma caiman have? And where is she now? Any momma of any species will protect its young, will attack and kill any perceived threat.

  And what about the baby’s protective instincts? Might the baby lash out, wriggle free of the guide’s bare arms in an attempt to protect its mother? Does that protective instinct work both ways? Is it reciprocal? If the baby perceives me as a threat, it could lunge for my outstretched finger, my arm, my body leaning over the water toward it. Who’s to say that baby caiman wouldn’t do anything to protect its mother?

  Right before my finger pressed against the baby’s body, right before the click of physical contact, I had regrets. What if I had just made the wrong decision? What if touching the caiman was the last thing I’d ever do?

  My students loved being able to choose those endings (during read-aloud we’d take a class vote, or students like Tyler, who devoured the stories, flipped furiously from one page to the next each morning during silent reading time), but what I loved more was being able to go back and choose the path we didn’t choose the first time. The ability to retrace our steps and try again. The canoe in the story seemed so appealing and adventurous at the time, but we had no idea it would lead to an early demise. How could we have known? (Well, I had a pretty strong hunch, actually. But I’m not the publisher’s target demographic.)

  I doubt that nine-year-old Tyler was able to spot the controlling formula that ran throughout the series. Based on the page number, the concept of the road less traveled, and knowing that most kids reading the book would choose the canoe, the real story is about curiosity and risk. It’s safer to stay on the riverbank, to hike the hill—but a canoe sounds much more adventurous.

  I don’t remember my students or myself regretting choosing the canoe, only to end up dead. It’s easy when you’ve got a book in your hands, when you can flip back and forth with words that never really affect you. You can die a thousand times, put the book down and pick up another.

  If only life were like that.

  I must live with my decisions. Each time my father calls from Mexico to say that he wants to move back to Visalia, or at least return for an extended visit, I punt—tell him why now’s not a good time, how he can’t afford it, how his money is tight, I’m too busy taking care of my mother, that maybe later would be better. He sighs into the phone and says he won’t be any trouble, and he promises to look after himself when he gets here. That scorpion, the one in a jar—it’s still on the table next to my desk. The liquid is even lower than it was when I took it from his office a while back. I keep meaning to add more alcohol, but I’ve never made the effort. If I’d just make the time, the scorpion would remain pickled, mummified indefinitely. But to be honest, the thought of unscrewing the lid stops me dead—what if it smells? Or what if opening the jar lets in fresh oxygen, enough to hasten the process of decomposition? Or what if none of that bad stuff happens—the scorpion does not stink, the oxygen does not turn the scorpion to dust—what if the truth is that I just don’t want to be bothered? What if I’m just too damn lazy to put forth the effort? What if it’s all about me—a Carole-centric excuse that supports my Carole-centric life? Instead of staring at the scorpion through the jar, instead of writing a whole goddam book about it, should I pay more attention to the creature itself? I’ve intellectualized this scorpion for over a hundred pages now, but I’ve never taken the time, the effort to replenish its jar with the only substance that will keep it intact.

  Good daughter or bad?

  My canoe has crashed, and it seems that the story really ends here. I can’t go back and take the bank of the river. I chose the canoe.

  As my mother sorts photographs on her lap, I choose to withhold a bit of information. A few hours ago, I learned that one of her colleagues passed away—Dr. H, a math and science professor with whom she shared an office for many years, died in his sleep. On Facebook, my friend Steve posted:

  Jan 5, 2013: My
dad passed away in his sleep this morning. He’d been suffering from end-stage diabetes for years, and he spent the last year and a half in a rest home as his body decayed. I told him a few times—never enough in the end—that I appreciated him as a model teacher. From him I learned that striving to be an excellent educator is a noble pursuit. Because of him I teach and I love doing so. I wish I’d had more time with him to tell him these things again and again, but his suffering is over now, and for that I am even more grateful. Currently, we have no plans for a memorial service because he was a private person and asked not to have one, but if plans change, I will update here and in person. Thank you in advance for your prayers and thoughts. I’m going off the radar for a while.

  Off the radar.

  Yes, I understand. Since my mother’s stroke a year ago and her ensuing series of life-or-death crises that have overwhelmed my life, I’ve been off the radar myself. With the exception of a select few, I’ve dropped out of practically everything and everyone: I quit my job as teaching associate at the university, dropped most of my graduate school classes (I was both a grad student and a flunky TA at the time of this writing—in the middle of one of those midlife do-overs, transforming myself from third-grade teacher to English professor), shunned my friends, ignored most emails, phone calls, and Facebook messages. Not by choice, but out of necessity. I was needed at the hospitals, the doctors’ offices, the therapy gyms, the estate planner’s office, the bank, the attorney’s desk, the nursing home dining rooms, my spare bedroom turned mother’s new quarters, the hallway outside the intensive care nurses’ station at five o’clock each morning where the doctors meet for their rounds. An instinctual drive overtook my entire body—I could not have stayed away if I’d tried. I suppose my going off the radar was a choice, but it seemed more like instinct.