In the Electric Eden

by Nick Arvin

  Eventually his old man, with undisguised annoyance, made use of his thirty years of accumulated connections at the plant to pull Duke in, got him assigned to operate a press that pushed nine-inch ring gears onto heavy steel transfer cases for pickup truck axles. The work was no less dull than donuts, but the pay was about four times better. His old man soon retired, but Duke stayed on the midnight shift for six years, then the day shift for two, loading the press, pushing the two palm buttons that caused a ring gear to be crushed into a transfer case, removing the two pieces made one, loading again, pushing buttons, removing, loading, pushing, removing. It awed Duke to think of all the ring gears he’d pressed onto transfer cases now propelling thousands and thousands of pickup trucks down the highways of America.

  He jiggled his steering wheel a little, pleased by how smoothly the car swayed within the lane. The surroundings were brightly familiar. Hardly a stone or an ear of corn had changed since high school when he had been up and down these roads endlessly, killing time while he should have been studying. The road began a long curve ahead and he slowed to enter it, then remembered his confidence and accelerated.

  While he was working at the plant he had noticed the engineers in white shirts and polished shoes who occasionally walked up and down the assembly line. They would get together and stand pointing at the various machines, gesturing, talking. They seemed to be into endless pointing and talking, and they had offices stocked with coffee machines and computers. The offices could be entered only with special electronic ID badges the engineers wore clipped to their belts, and Duke had envied, first of all, those badges, like passkeys to some hoity-toity club. Then, thinking about it, he envied their jobs altogether. He imagined wandering the line, pointing and chatting, retreating now and again to an air-conditioned office. Oh, he knew it was more complicated than that; he saw what they did. An engineer needed to know how to bolt a machine into the floor, how to diagnose a torque testing station with a burnt-out clutch, how to fix leaky half-shaft seals by experimenting with different kinds of rubber gasket. But it looked much more interesting, more rewarding, than running a stamping press relentlessly, endlessly, forever—load, press, remove.

  One day a circuit box blew and the entire line was down. An engineer happened to be nearby, watching the electricians work. He was young, his smile quick and confident. Duke asked him, “How does someone get a job like yours?” And the engineer said, “Go to Ann Arbor. That’s the best place; that’s where I went.”

  It took most of a year for Duke to mull the idea and become firm in his decision. When he announced one day that he wanted to go to college, his old man said, “It’s about time.” But when he mentioned engineering, his old man was incredulous. He said in a mock-gentle tone, “But, Duke, how can you be an engineer when you’re always breaking things?” Which was true, Duke had a well-earned reputation for mechanical ineptitude. As a child his brother’s things had been off-limits to him, because in Duke’s hands toys quickly began missing eyes and wings and wheels, or their little battery-powered motors would not run, or they merely fell to pieces, completely destroyed. Later, as a teenager, Duke ruined a wall in the rec room while attempting to build a set of wall-mounted bookcases. He exploded a vacuum cleaner while trying to repair it, giving everyone in the family sneezing fits for a week. He nearly took his old man’s head off when he accidentally sent the lawn mower blade flying. Yet, he argued to himself, didn’t those mistakes only indicate he had the interest and inclination, that he merely lacked the proper skills? Skills could be learned, surely, by anyone with enough determination. He had begun to feel more comfortable with machines, perhaps because of the years spent working a press eight to twelve hours a day, five to seven days a week. Things broke down from time to time at the plant, and not as a result of anything Duke had done. Many of the tools were upwards of forty years old and fell apart under simple fatigue. When the line was stopped, Duke sat and watched the skilled tradesmen and the engineers work—disassembling, repairing, reassembling—and some of the mystery was removed. The machines were actually, in many ways, rather simple, products of mere human minds and hands. He could do this.

  When he had made it clear he was adamant about becoming an engineer, his old man finally said, “OK, fine, and how are you going to pay for this?”

  “I have money saved.”

  “Oh, right. Because you live at home and never go out.”

  “Dad, kiss my ass,” Duke wanted to say. But he said only, “I’ve been saving.”

  “Saving,” his old man said. “OK, well—” he shrugged “—good luck.”

  Duke took community college classes in math and physics, prepped two hours a day for six months for the SAT, wrote twelve drafts of his statement of purpose, and it still shocked him when he was admitted to the School of Engineering. His old man’s response was a slightly skeptical, less-than-encouraging nod. There always seemed to be some mitigating incident. Days later, Duke, lit with confidence, volunteered to change the windshield wipers on his old man’s Buick. He’d taken one of the wipers off its arm and then, accidentally, let the arm snap back into place before he’d put the replacement wiper on. When the bare metal hit the glass, the entire windshield fractured into a glimmering blue-green jigsaw puzzle. When Duke told his old man what had happened and offered to pay for a new windshield, his old man nodded fiercely, hell yes, he most certainly would pay for it.

  But now his subcompact hummed as he hurtled around the curving asphalt. The car had always been small for him, his knees rubbed the bottom of the steering wheel, and it wasn’t exactly overpowered, but it took a corner with surprising poise. He could feel the tires flexing and straining under him but still holding to the asphalt, and he stayed precisely in the center of his lane. He was thirty-two, finishing his engineering degree this summer after five and a half years of class work. Last week, after interviews and a drug test, he’d gotten an offer to come back to work for US Axle. He knew precisely where he would clip his electronic ID badge—right-hand side, first belt loop.

  About thirty feet ahead a car was laid across the road like a barge.

  Duke tried to get his foot from the gas pedal to the brake, and he recognized the car, even as the rear passenger side door of his old man’s Buick came quickly and improbably close—it seemed he could have reached ahead and touched it by the time he felt himself suddenly flung forward and heard a short and horrible chaos of steel buckling and ripping. His seat belt caught him and his head snapped forward then down and the rest of him strained against the belt. There was a sickening, immeasurable black moment cut from time, lost entirely.

  He blinked and raised his head off his chest. The steering wheel was much closer to him than it should have been, like he’d gotten into the car after a short person had been driving it with the seat forward. The floor underfoot felt bulged and odd. The windshield was gone—it lay in a crystalline scatter over the dashboard and in his lap. The hood was doubled up, blocking his view. He managed to swing the door open and tried to get out but could not, could not move, and it took him a long, desperate moment to figure out that this was because he had not yet released his seat belt.

  He pressed the seat belt button and it retracted just like it always did, like nothing in particular had happened. With both hands gripping the top of the door he stood for a moment, waiting for the road to stop seesawing. His little car had T-boned his old man’s Buick like it desperately wanted to get inside, and the subcompact had taken the worst of it. Duke sneezed once and things steadied. He felt remarkably OK—not entirely clearheaded, but his limbs and organs seemed to be in working order. He could see his old man sitting in the driver’s seat, looking angrily through one window then the other. With a hand on the Buick for support, Duke started around it, shouting, “Dad! Dad!”

  His old man rolled down his window and said, “Duke?”

  “Are you OK?”

  “Duke.” His old man squinted at him. “Duke, I can’t believe—damn it, son. Why the hell d
id you run into my car?”

  “Why were you parked across the road?”

  “I wasn’t parked. I was turning around.”

  Duke tugged at his old man’s door. “Come on, we should get away. The car might explode.”

  His old man frowned. “That only happens in the movies. You’ve just put a bit of a dent in my car, that’s all.”

  “It does not only happen in the movies.”

  “Do you smell gas?”

  Duke sniffed. “No.”

  “Then it won’t explode. Settle down, OK?”

  This, Duke thought, was the kind of thing they should teach him in engineering school—how to tell if a car was about to explode. But they had taught him nothing so practical. Adrenaline buzzed in him like a low voltage AC current, and he felt too disoriented and too near collapse to argue with his old man. He breathed deep, put his hands on the roof, looked down at his old man’s face—craggy and contemptuous—and felt, as he always did around this man, like he was about knee high, looking up, hoping for a pat on the head. He tried to recover the relaxed confidence he had felt earlier, the calm self-possession, the certainty of his progress. He breathed. He blurted, “Dad, I’ve got a job lined up.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “A job. Never mind. It’s not important right now.”

  “A job? Where? California? Did I send you that article about how all the engineers are going to California now?”

  “No, back at US Axle.” He thought this would actually, finally, merit some congratulations, and he allowed himself to speak with the unhesitant force of authority and pride: “I’m going to be a process engineer.”

  His old man’s lips tightened around his teeth and his eyebrows drew down. He slapped a hand on the car door. He sputtered. “You have to be kidding.” He glared at Duke. Duke shook his head. “So you’re going to be one of those bastards installing robots so they don’t have to deal with humans and the union? Or did they hire you to pack the whole damn plant off to Mexico?”

  Duke looked at the ground. “You know it’s not like that.”

  “Shit.” His old man rubbed the palms of his hands into his eyes. “Shit. Son. You embarrass me.” He held his hands a few inches from his face and glared at them.

  Duke was quiet. Then he said, “Look.”

  But his old man wagged his head, and Duke didn’t really want to continue. He stood embarrassed and silent, looking across the roof of the Buick while a breeze ruffled the leaves of the cornstalks along the road, raising smells of dust, of stale fertilizer and chemical herbicides. He wished he were not here, closed his eyes and wished it hard.

  But nothing changed.

  When he looked down his old man was leaning forward to turn the key in the ignition. From the front of the car came a series of clicks, but the engine did not start. He turned the key again—more clicks. He sat back and said to the windshield, “Well, go ahead and fix it.”

  “What?”

  “You’re the engineer,” his old man said. “It’ll be good practice, fixing a broken-down car.”

  “We should get out of the road.”

  His old man glanced around. “You knocked me half off the road anyway. Just take a look.”

  “This isn’t really what they teach us.”

  “What do they teach you? Different ways to push paper?”

  Duke stepped away. “Dad,” he said. His old man peered out the window, frowning, his forehead furrowed like a washboard. “OK,” Duke said. “Open the hood.”

  The hood clunked and popped up an inch. Duke went to the front and fumbled to find the release latch. He had to bend to look for it while his old man scowled at him through the window. When he had the hood up, it blocked the view from the front seat, and Duke sagged in relief. He told himself that it was no small measure of success that his old man seemed to think he might actually be able to do something useful. But he looked down and knew it was hopeless. He had even taken an internal combustion engines class last semester, but it was all about efficiency curves, Otto cycles, and the relative merits of spark retardation versus increased air swirl to reduce NOx emissions. The class never looked at an actual engine. Here were chunks of metal and plastic all interconnected by tangles of hoses and wires. Nothing was obviously amiss. None of the hoses were broken. Nothing was smoking. He poked at a couple of random wires.

  Engineering school was an exercise in frustration and sleeplessness for him. He studied endlessly and barely maintained Cs. The classes were packed with skinny, pimpled kids who occasionally approached to ask if he would mind buying liquor for them. They did in fifteen minutes homework problems that took Duke an hour and a half, and they crowded the back rows of the lecture halls and whispered while he perched in the front row and took scrupulous notes he hardly understood. Worst of all, he knew from experience that none of what he was studying had anything to do with what an engineer did in the plant—resolving production problems, diagnosing and fixing machines. Instead he was learning about differential equations and the combinational forces of complex kinematic situations and how to calculate convection coefficients for spheres in flows of air or water. Once, after a particularly bewildering lecture in thermodynamics about the Gibbs function, an entirely theoretical construct related to various other theoretical quantities in some mathematical manner, Duke, in an agony of frustration, went to talk to the professor in his office. This professor had an uneven gray mustache and thick, dusty-looking eyeglasses, and the other students snickered because he still carried a slide rule. But Duke liked the man because his fingers were thick and scarred with years of building experimental equipment and because he often came into class wearing lab coats that smelled of solvents and pants perforated by tiny burn holes from stray welding sparks. In the professor’s office, surrounded by shelves and boxes piled with a hundred miscellaneous pieces of equipment, Duke felt like this was a man who built things—not a math or computer-headed geek, but a man he could talk to. He started complaining about the Gibbs function. He wound himself up and claimed he could never, ever figure out the Gibbs function and asked, “But who cares? Gibbs won’t help me fix a fried logic box. How will it help me weld one piece of steel to another, or design a machine to torque to specification? How is it going to help me install a new air gun into an assembly line?”

  The professor snorted through his bristling mustache. “Look, son,” he said. “This is a research institution. We teach first principles, not applications. If you want nuts and bolts and welding, you should think about one of the technical colleges.”

  “Oh—” Duke said, realizing, suddenly, sickeningly, that there would never be any sympathy for him in this place. He coughed and nodded and tried to look like the kind of student who might be forgiven for his transgressions. Contritely, he asked if the professor might explain Gibbs one more time. He passed the class, with a C minus.

  “Got it yet?”

  Duke called, “Why don’t you try the key again.”

  His old man grunted. Clicks came from somewhere in the engine, but nothing visible happened. The clicks stopped, and Duke peered into a muddle of dusty, greasy steel and rubber, hating it all.

  His old man called, “Got it?” Duke prodded one of the hoses, frowning. His old man added, “Five years of college now, isn’t it? And you haven’t learned a single useful thing, have you? J. H. Christ in a duffel bag.”

  Duke wished that they had taught him how to make a car blow up. But he said, “I guess you’re right.” He came around to his old man’s side of the car. “I can’t figure it out.”

  “Get the girl to help us,” his old man said. “Where did the girl go?”

  Confused, Duke turned and scanned the road. “What girl?” The road was empty, except for a go-cart a short distance away. Its steering wheel had been cleverly fashioned out of a plastic dinner plate.

  “There was a girl. She could help us.”

  This stalled Duke. Around them the fields of corn were now dead still. Overhead
, a distant plane marked the sky with white contrails. A house stood about a half mile down the road, and beyond that stood a single enormous maple tree amid the corn. This far into the back roads there might not be anyone coming along for quite a while. He supposed that they needed police, tow trucks, insurance claims agents, maybe an ambulance.

  Dust hovered in the air. Behind him, Duke’s old man said, “Hey. Quit standing there. Let’s go.”

  Duke went over and leaned in the window. “You’re OK?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Help me out. I’ll walk with you.”

  “Maybe you should stay and rest.”

  “Help me with this door,” his old man said, plucking at the inside door handle.

  Duke seized the outer handle and pulled. The door would not open. His old man said, “Heave. Use your weight. You’ve built up some padding at college.”

  Duke let go of the handle and stepped back. He and his old man stared at each other. It was always this way. After Mom’s death, two years ago, he had taken a full week out of school to help with the arrangements while Kevin, on the other hand, flew in from his law practice in Phoenix for just a half day—it was the first time he had been back in three years. Duke picked him up at the airport in Detroit. As they drove north, toward home, Kevin made fun of Duke’s little car and talked about a bachelor’s party he had been to the day before. There had been strippers and something about an eggplant that Kevin found very funny. Duke did not recall Kevin being so chummy in the past. Growing up they had never really understood each other; their concerns seemed utterly separate. Kevin, for example, had never seemed to care about getting smiles and nods of encouragement from his old man, and in turn he received them constantly. He accepted them with an attitude of stifled boredom and went on with the business of making himself a success in the world. Duke suspected that Kevin’s entire purpose in adolescence had been to arrange a dignified escape from this awkward, huddling, blue-collar little family and the semirural suburbs he had been born into. Despite all Duke’s personal frustration, he could not help being awed and impressed by Kevin. And happy for him. He had done it, gotten away, and wasn’t it a bit much to expect him to spend a lot of time looking back now? When they got to the house Kevin assumed a serious expression, and his old man, on seeing Kevin, shambled over and fell against him, weeping. Their hug went on for a minute, then two, while Duke fretted around the room, straightening the armrest covers on the sofa. It was the first time that Duke had seen his old man cry since Mom had died. Returning Kevin to the airport that evening, he heard all about Kevin’s girlfriend’s remarkable breasts. Several days later, when he felt he had done everything he could, Duke announced he would be going back to Ann Arbor. His old man said gruffly, without looking up, “Thanks for your help.” For a moment Duke was ridiculously, glowingly elated. Then, turning angry, he had left.