Lightspeed Magazine Issue 32

by Judith Berman

  I thought about it for a moment. “Ah. Like water?”

  “Like water you can’t see or feel or smell, yes. Which means?”

  “The air is on top. The Freon fills up the basement and pushes the air out.”

  He grinned, big. “On the nosey, little posy.”

  “You’d pass out, eh?”

  “Before you died. Heard about a shrimp boat with a refrigeration leak down in the hull. Different members of the crew kept going down into the hold to see what happened to the previous guy. The coast guard found the vessel going in circles, everybody suffocated.”

  I eyed the stairs dubiously. “You sure we’re okay?”

  He got that look on his face and smiled.

  “No!” I said. “I don’t need another real-life math problem!”

  He led me back upstairs where we found Mom typing at her computer. She had a laptop with a battery. She didn’t have to stop what she was doing because Buzz was busted.

  “What’s wrong with Buzz?” she asked.

  “Leaking Freon,” Dad said calmly.

  “And displacing all the air in the house!” I said.

  Mom’s eyes widened and she looked at Dad. Dad shrugged. “Not very likely, but Millicent is going to calculate the answer to that.”

  Mom raised her eyebrows and pushed a pad of paper and a pen toward me across her desk.

  Dad said, “Assume an eight-foot-high ceiling. The generator room is twelve by ten feet. It’s about a quarter of the entire basement.”

  I did that part in my head. “Nine-hundred-sixty cubic feet. How much Freon?”

  Dad jumped and I don’t mean he bounced in place. He disappeared, vanished. I said something under my breath, which caused Mom to sit up straight and give me “the look.”

  “Sorry. I was watching my show. I already did homework today.” I sounded whiny. I hate sounding whiny. I tried again, with a more reasonable voice. “I work hard, don’t I?”

  “The look” faded and Mom said, “Yes, honey, you do. But you know your father. He never finished school. He’s one of the smartest men I know but he has this thing about education.”

  “Tell me about it. If I hear the phrase ‘teachable moment’ one more time, I’m gonna barf.”

  Dad reappeared at my elbow, a manual and a sheet of paper in his hand. “Had to go to the library for the Material Safety Data sheet. Didn’t know the density.”

  I looked at Mom and sighed heavily. Dad put the books on the desk by the notepad and slid a chair over for me to sit.

  It was dark, but when he pulled the bedroom door all the way open, the emergency light from the hall shone across half the desk.

  “Dad! This is Buzz’s manual―you went into the basement!”

  He shrugged. “As you said, it’s not poisonous. I held my breath. Wasn’t in there more than five seconds.” Mom and I both gave him “the look” but after so many years, he’s impervious. He reached down and tapped the notepad.

  I sighed and sat down. The manual specs said the generator was charged with 175 pounds of Freon, the ozone-safe R-22 version. The Material Data Sheet told me the density, and when I converted, I got .225 pounds per cubic foot. That seemed pretty heavy but I double-checked it. “Must be a big molecule.” I grabbed Mom’s laptop and called up a calculator. “Seven hundred and eighty cubic feet. Uh, in the generator room that would displace the air up to, uh, six and a half feet off the floor.”

  Dad held his hand over his head. “Worse than that, I think. You didn’t account for altitude.”

  “Oh.” I blushed. As I’d said, we’d already done Boyle’s law but I’d forgotten. I knew the conversion factor for our forty-five hundred feet of altitude by heart. “Okay.” I multiplied the figure by 1.18. “Call it 920 cubic feet.” I tapped away. “It would fill the room to seven and two-thirds feet.”

  Mom spoke. “I guess we don’t have to worry about the whole house.”

  I felt the need to make up for my earlier slip. “Really, not even the basement. When we open the door to the generator room it will flow out into the other rooms and be less than two feet high. Not a problem if we don’t lie on the floor.”

  Mom turned to Dad. “You won’t leave it there, will you?”

  Dad shook his head. “I’ll twin to a higher altitude and suck it out. But before it all leaks out, I want to find out where it’s leaking, so we can fix it. Hopefully without hauling the thing back to Reykjavik.”

  “We can put the stuff from the freezer on the porch,” Mom said, glancing at the window. It was eighteen degrees Fahrenheit outside and would probably drop another ten degrees before morning. “But the stuff in the refrigerator needs not to freeze. Ice chest?”

  Dad shook his head. “I’ll go get a backup generator. I’ve been meaning to for some time, but Buzz has been so reliable and I’ve been worried about carbon monoxide.”

  “Well,” Mom said. “Since it looks like we’ll be without power for a while—” She looked at me. “—Let’s go shopping.”

  “Clothes?” I asked, hopefully.

  “You’ve got plenty of clothes,” Mom said. “I’m thinking lentils … about nine tons.”

  Yes, I have enough clothes. I know that, but it’s not the clothes I’m interested in. It’s the people—the clerks, the other customers, the people walking by on the streets. Mom and Dad never let me spend significant time with other people.

  It’s like being in a cult.

  Mom said summer so that meant Southern Hemisphere. I changed out of my sweater into a T-shirt and put on running shoes. When I came out onto the landing Mom was waiting, jeans and a T-shirt like me, plus a cotton work shirt and a broad-brimmed hat.

  “Africa?” I asked.

  “Australia.”

  “Let me grab my shades.” I had to fumble in the dark but I found my snowboarding shades and grabbed a Yomiuri Giants baseball cap.

  When I came out again, Mom opened her arms and I walked into her embrace. When she let me go my ears popped, the sun was blazing down, and I could smell a feedlot. I put on my glasses and hat. It’s warm enough at home, with the hot spring radiators, but in the depth of winter you’re always aware of the cold at the edges, in the corners, near the windows.

  At least for the moment, the sun felt as good as Mom’s embrace.

  It was a small town, I could tell. There was a train yard with large grain silos, a passenger station, and a railroad museum. An old-fashioned railway water tank sat among eucalyptus trees. Old-fashioned letters spelled Kalgoorlie Bitter across one square face, with a small image of a foaming beer stein. A street sign below said Allenby Street. Across the road was a Chinese restaurant, and my stomach rumbled.

  I pointed at it and Mom shrugged. “Perhaps. Business first.”

  Her business was near the grain silos at the office of the Cooperative Bulk Handling Group. A passenger train pulled in while Mom was inside and I watched people get off. Many of them went into the train museum or headed into the restaurant.

  I overheard enough to determine that the train had come from Perth and would continue on to Kalgoorlie, and that a few of the passengers were doing the entire run across the continent to Sydney.

  Mom came back outside with a man who said, “Down this way. We loaded ’er up yesterday arvo.”

  The accent was broader than I was used to. We’d been to Perth and Sydney and Melbourne but this was more like Crocodile Dundee.

  He led us around the corner to where a medium-sized dump truck stood outside warehouse doors. He stood up on the step and stuck his head in the open window. “Yair. Keys are in ’er.”

  “Great,” Mom said. “I’ll have it back in four hours?”

  “Tomorrow morning be all right,” he said, grinning broadly. “This your daughter?”

  Mom nodded. I stood up and nodded politely. His face was like an old piece of leather, lined and tan. I tried not to stare. I don’t get to see people much, not up close.

  I started to get in on the right-hand side of the truck and
froze in the doorway when I realized it was right-hand drive. I knew there was something odd about the traffic I’d been watching. I got into the seat and slid under the wheel to the passenger side, banging my knee on the stick shift.

  Mom followed me in, started it up, and pulled out into the wrong-side-of-the-road traffic like she drove here every day. She took a piece of paper out of her shirt pocket and handed it to me.

  “You’re the navigator.”

  We left the town of Merredin, Western Australia, on 94, the Great Eastern Highway, but only as far as the first exit. Mom drove south a mile, and turned off onto a weed-filled dirt road lined with high brush on both sides. It curved away from the paved road and Mom pulled off as soon as it was out of sight of the highway.

  “Watch out for snakes,” she said.

  “Great,” I said. “Visit exotic Australia. Get bitten by an exotic snake. Die exotically.”

  Mom jumped away, vanishing like a lightbulb turning off.

  I climbed out the window and up onto the roof of the cab. After what she’d said about snakes, I wasn’t going anywhere near the bushes.

  Mom was in the back of the truck, intermittently. That is, she was picking up burlap sacks one at a time and disappearing, reappearing, grabbing another sack and repeating.

  They were stenciled CBHG Yellow Lentils fifteen kilos. I did the math while I watched Mom empty the truck. Nine tons of lentils, presuming she meant English tons, would be about 545 bags. Mom was doing one every five seconds, though she took an occasional break. Straight through, it would have taken about forty-five minutes, but she slowed down near the end. The truck was empty in an hour and ten minutes.

  She was sweaty and dusty, too.

  “Back to the warehouse?” I said.

  She shook her head, vanished, and reappeared, a bottle of cold water in each hand. She handed me one and guzzled the other, sprinkling some of it over her hair.

  Before driving back into Merredin, she drove a half hour further out of town and the half hour back. “Mileage,” explained Mom. “Don’t want them to think I’m too local if we buy more.”

  We listened to a call-in show on the radio, entertained by the accents. “Why do they pitch their sentences up at the end, like every line is a question?” I asked.

  Mom shook her head. “Don’t know. I’ve heard the same thing in parts of the UK. It’s just a variant. I’m sure we sound odd to them, too.”

  We gave the truck back to the man at the co-op and he returned a fat envelope. “Darn. Halfway hoping I’d get to keep your deposit.”

  Mom smiled and thanked him, and said, “I may need another nine tons next month. Will they still be in season?”

  “You like your lentils, I guess. There’ll be some in our warehouse for at least a month after the last harvest, too.”

  We went to the Chinese restaurant then, but I was yawning like a fiend by the time we’d eaten. It was early afternoon here, but well after midnight at home. After Mom paid, we went to the restroom and she jumped us home from there.

  I barely remember falling into bed. I don’t remember taking off my shoes, but they were in the closet when I woke up which means, of course, that Mom pulled them off. I would’ve kicked them into the corner.

  It was gray outside. The sun was up as high as it was going to get and it still hadn’t cleared the far ridge. The sky was clear, though, and you could see the whole valley, trimmed with evergreens and draped with heavy white snow, except where our local elk herd had used their hooves to cut through to the grass on the flat.

  It wouldn’t be long before the elk moved down the mountain to the river valley for the winter.

  This time of year the light never wakes me. Instead it was a grinding noise, like a snowmobile or an off-road motorbike, that brought me out of sleep, and I realized Dad must’ve made good his promise to bring in a backup generator. As I moved downstairs the sound got louder, but it was still a background noise, not overwhelming.

  Dad had spread newspaper on the dining room table and was fiddling with some mechanical parts. He smiled at me. “Sleep okay? You guys were back late.”

  I made my noncommittal noise: half grunt, half hum. “Where’s Mom?”

  He looked around, then said, “Oh, that’s right. She’s organizing the warehouse.”

  The warehouse was on the outskirts of a small town in Michigan, a steel building thrown up by one of GM’s vendors right before the local plant was shut down. Dad bought it cheap, and never used.

  I gestured at the parts. “Too noisy downstairs?”

  He shook his head. “It’s not the noise in the basement. It’s the noise outside, where the exhaust pipe pokes though the wall. Need to get a longer pipe. Run it above the roof, perhaps.”

  “Wouldn’t that just make it louder up by our bedrooms?” Dad got that look in his eye, and I said quickly, “Just yes or no. I don’t want another physics lecture!”

  Dad grinned. “Okay. No. It wouldn’t make it louder, not if the mounting brackets were dampened.”

  “Fine.”

  I made it all the way through cooking pancakes, buttering them, and pouring the syrup before I asked, “Okay. Why would an exhaust pipe sticking up above the roof be quieter?”

  Dad grinned. “Up there the noise doesn’t have anything to reflect off of. The sound waves exit the pipe in a hemispheric pattern mostly up. Down where it’s coming out now, it echoes off the ground and the snow and the trees and even the springhouse. So we’re hearing it pretty loud.”

  “Buzz was never that loud,” I said.

  Dad pointed at the pipe before him. “And as soon as I get this piece welded we can get back to Buzz. Well, welded and reinstalled, and the Freon charged back into the system.”

  “And you’ll get rid of the noisy generator?”

  “Oh no. We’ll keep it for backup. Hopefully we won’t have to run it much.”

  Mom showed up shortly after that. She was wearing shorts, a tank top, boots, and work gloves, and she was sweaty.

  Dad brushed the damp bangs back from her forehead. “You done already? I said I’d help.”

  Mom kissed him. “You load sixteen tons, whaddya get?” She flexed a bicep. “It’s better than a gym, any day.”

  I said, “I thought it was nine tons?”

  “Cultural reference,” Mom said. “Mid-twentieth century. Tennessee Ernie Ford.” I must’ve looked even more puzzled because she clarified. “He was a singer. ‘Sixteen Tons’ was a song.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Old stuff. Like Green Day?”

  Dad choked.

  “Or Beethoven?”

  Mom said, “Somewhere in between. When you’ve eaten, we need to distribute some lentils.”

  “What climate?”

  “Pakistan. The mountains. Pretty cold. Also,” she gestured toward her head.

  I grimaced. “Hijab.”

  She nodded and looked at Dad. “I’ll want your help transporting, okay?”

  “Where are you working?”

  “The IRC refugee camp on the border, west of Peshawar.”

  “The one Patel works at?” Dad said.

  Mom nodded. “The UN supplies have not been getting through. In the south, the Pashtun militias are diverting them for profit, and on the Afghan side, it’s a tossup between the Taliban and the poppy growers.”

  “Pretty dangerous area.” Dad’s voice was mild, but he was frowning.

  “We’re distributing from the women’s clinic compound. No men allowed. The main problems are outside camp, as usual. Safe enough inside.”

  “Okay. While you change, I’ll get this to the welder. Be back in a bit.”

  I dressed warmly—long underwear, my snowboarding pants, a fleece pullover. Over these I put on the traditional pants, tight at the ankle, baggy at the hips, and the knee length tunic, then the headscarf. I’d gone with Mom several times into areas where women wore the full burka, veil and all, but I wouldn’t have to today.

  Mom jumped me to the interior of a canvas te
nt, a large ten-by-ten structure over a dirt and gravel floor. It was cold, and the only light was a Coleman lantern Mom brought with her. My ears popped, but not as badly as they had in Australia, which meant the altitude was more like the mountains, where our house was. There were plastic drums and collapsed cardboard boxes stacked across the back, but the tent was mostly empty.

  Mom pointed at a tied-shut door flap. “It won’t be dawn for another two hours. We’ll be distributing through that door.”

  Dad showed up after that, with a folding screen, six feet high, eight feet long. He set it up close to the door so they could jump discretely from behind it, if necessary, after the distribution started.

  Working together, they took a half hour to bring all the lentils from the warehouse. Dad was bringing two bags at a time and he jumped much faster than Mom, flicking in and out without pausing. Of course, he’s been doing it far longer. I dragged the sacks within reach of the door and began stacking them. Our breath was still steaming but I wasn’t cold anymore.

  Dad left after all the lentils had been brought in and stacked. Mom jumped out and came back with cartons of plastic bags and big measuring scoops. “Two liters each, right?”

  We’d filled about fifty of the transparent bags, ready to hand out, when there was a scratching at the flap.

  Mom tensed and then said, “As-salaam alaikum.”

  The voice on the other side was a woman’s. “Bonjour, c’est moi, Magrit.”

  Mom relaxed and untied the tent flaps. The sun was hitting the surrounding peaks and the air that flowed through the door was markedly colder, not warmed by all our activity. Magrit was a tall woman wearing khakis and a white medical clinician’s coat buttoned all the way up to the neck. She had a wool scarf wrapped up over her chin and ears, and her arms were crossed, her hands tucked up into her armpits. A stethoscope stuck out of one pocket.

  “Good morning, Doctor,” Mom said.

  Magrit took a step back. She wasn’t looking at us, but at the stacks of burlap bags visible past the screen. “Sacredieu! They told me, but … I saw this place last night, late, before I came to bed—empty! How?”

  Mom did that thing she does, that therapist thing. She nodded her head and said, “That must be very disturbing.”