The War for Gloria: A Novel

by Atticus Lish

  “I was more of a Workers Party socialist. I was highly aware of economic injustice. When our check ran out at the end of the month, my sisters and I would dig for clams on the flats. Otherwise we wouldn’t eat. When I was fourteen, I lied about my age to get a job as a machinist.”

  Leonard’s mother had been a strict woman. Leonard had told Gloria a number of memorable stories about her. Corey heard that she would wait until the market was closing on Friday to get the fish that no one wanted. “Once, I touched a fish in her pan,” Leonard said, “and a worm came out and wrapped around my finger.”

  Gloria shuddered and Corey was amazed.

  But the most interesting thing about Leonard was that while he was working there as a campus security officer, he was also studying physics at MIT.

  * * *

  —

  Everything had been stacked against Leonard from the start, said Gloria, who was his biggest champion. He had to wear expensive aviator glasses for his headaches, a curse that made him suffer. And don’t forget that all his brothers died. The East Boston schools were no good: a throwaway education for throwaway kids, the idea being that they were going to grow up to pour concrete, and here was this special young person with nowhere to turn, with no one to recognize his gifts, no nurturance—it was something she could relate to.

  “And then he’s working as a security guard at MIT, and he starts reading Springer-Verlag textbooks on quantum mechanics.”

  If you listened to the story of Leonard’s life as Gloria told it, apparently Leonard had discovered his gift for scientific thought much the same way Siddhartha had found enlightenment one day beneath the banyan tree.

  Corey had no frame of reference for how hard physics at MIT was, but everyone said it was hard; it was as hard as anything could get intellectually, and to go there while working as a campus cop had to be unheard-of. More than once, Corey had heard his mother and her friends comparing Leonard to Good Will Hunting.

  * * *

  —

  For years, Leonard had been saying he was working on what physicists called a result of some kind. He talked at length about his intellectual work, about why he wasn’t having much luck with it: He needed to get away; he needed time. Our capitalist society stood in his way; he had to make a living like a peasant. As the years passed without a result, she worried for him. Was he getting bitter? A professor to whom he submitted a paper had failed to respond. She listened to Leonard’s diatribes about the man; they lasted months. She grew afraid to ask him about science, even in the most general way. A safer subject was union politics (the campus cops were unionized, he said—and they were all screwed up). He made it sound as if he was busy all the time. He said he planned to become a millionaire. He was always away, always disappearing, always occupied, always involved in something, but she had a feeling it was nothing after all.

  When they first met, she recalled, Leonard used to talk to her in an endless stream of science metaphors. There had been no question in her mind that he was a genius. To make herself more interesting to him, she’d tried reading popularized science books. Usually she retained nothing from these efforts, but James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science had made a lasting impression on her and changed the way she saw the world. It described the fractal geometry of nature, the patterns in random, unpredictable and turbulent phenomena, like storms and weather.

  Trees, lightning, river deltas all shared the same geometry, a self-replicating fractal pattern where the large-scale structure was repeated on the small scale, on the smallest scale, no matter how far down you went. This endlessly reiterated self-dependency could amplify the tiniest disturbance—the flutter of a butterfly’s wing—into a hurricane that took down houses. If you looked into a storm deeply enough, a complex tapestry emerged, often of fantastic beauty. She thought the Mandelbrot set looked exactly like a Tibetan mandala.

  Nature could not be understood, not ever. To experience chaos, she saw you didn’t need a storm. All you needed was the right man. Leonard always left her. He was like her inspirations. She never knew when he would call on her again. She recognized the faucet turned off, but not quite all the way, inside his head. And hers as well. If you plotted his visits on a graph, the self-similar beauty would emerge. The minutes with him would look like the weeks, and the weeks would look like the years. All the essays she’d never written and never would. It would make a fractal, Gloria was certain. It would bloom like clouds or be a starfish or a tree.

  * * *

  —

  Once, when Corey was ten, he and his mom had driven out to meet Leonard at a D’Angelo’s sub shop off Route 2 near the town of Ayer. Pine trees rose above the restaurant, which was next door to a dry cleaner’s and a quiet grocery store with a long brown roof—and all around them there were trees and the suburban silence and the sun falling silently into the wells of greenery below the stone-gray highway.

  Gloria was wearing a hippie dress and round blue sunglasses that made her look like a thin, blonde-headed Janis Joplin. They had finished eating and each now sat before an empty paper plate that used to hold a sandwich.

  Leonard wiped his hands and cleared his throat. “I’ve got it now,” he said and began telling them the structure of the universe. “Some people think the universe has seven dimensions. Some people think it’s expanding like a balloon. Some say it’s flat. But I know now that those models are wrong. The evidence points to multiple universes.”

  Gloria was thrilled. Multiple universes reminded her of a Tibetan mandala. “Worlds bubbling into existence all around us. Bubbling up and vanishing!” She sighed. What excited her was to see the convergence of Eastern and Western cosmologies, as suggested in The Dancing Wu Li Masters, a book on the haunting similarity between traditional Taoist views of the universe and modern physics, which she was trying to comprehend—with difficulty!

  “That’s not a good book,” Leonard remarked. “It’s been discredited”; and she stopped talking.

  “Anyway. Multiple universes: That’s the model. My intuitive starting point. I still have to prove everything. And then after I prove everything, I have to prove it to a peer review board, if I want to get credit for it.”

  “The good old peer review board,” said Gloria. “We know about them.”

  “They’re very capable of putting professional self-interest before the search for truth.”

  “So if you were flying up there in a spaceship, what would it look like?” Corey asked.

  “It would look the same as it always looks to people in spaceships.”

  “What would it look like?” Gloria asked.

  “What, the universe?”

  “The multiple universes, all the bubbling worlds. Or is that a dumb question?”

  “It wouldn’t look like anything. You can only be in one bubble at a time. It would look the same as this one.”

  “Why couldn’t you break out of one bubble and fly to the next one?” Corey asked.

  * * *

  —

  That same year, he had tried to build a vessel of his own. He had gone exploring with the neighborhood kids in Dorchester in an abandoned field beneath an overpass. Venturing into the trees, they discovered a clearing in the center of a spiral mazelike thicket: a mattress, rusted beer cans, a rain-sodden roll of toilet paper, someone’s clothes, a shit smell—one of the greatest discoveries of his youth. This would be their base. “We can build a ship here and go anywhere we want.”

  Despite their island origins, the Cape Verdean kids didn’t seem to realize that Boston was a port city, that there were seaways all around them. One boy told Corey to watch out, yellow hair attracts bees.

  In the sweaty summer heat, they dragged boards and junk into their base with a general construction project in mind: either they would build a spaceship or a submarine. On paper Corey used a crayon to draw a vessel with a propeller and a tube for oxy
gen. He enlisted the others to bring back parts that they could use. They went out and found ropes, chains, strange but indispensable gizmos—broken toasters, a hollow pipe with a divider inside it like a nasal septum. Carlos, whose father fixed cars, recognized it as a carburetor.

  One of the boys handed Corey a rusted D-cell battery.

  “Is there any juice in this?”

  “No, we were throwing it out.”

  Corey looked at what they had in their coffee can of nuts and screws, conscious of a dilemma.

  “I think maybe we have to stick with a submarine.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t think we have enough parts for a spaceship.”

  * * *

  —

  But it wasn’t long thereafter that, by opening his mother’s copy of The Flower Ornament Scripture, a sixteen-hundred-page book, he had encountered the mystery of Vairocana, that being of emptiness and bliss who had overcome his animal nature through seated meditation. Corey was gripped by the idea of the mind as a vessel gliding on an endless inner sea, entering a trance and coming out of it refreshed and empowered, able to reach into secret stores of mental and physical strength. He aimed to learn tantric practices, to remake himself as a shaved-headed disciple in a bare room with his gaze turned inward.

  What would his vessel bring back if he sailed as far as he could go? He imagined super strength, an iron body, immortality, the ability to slow his heartbeat down so that he could survive being buried alive.

  At dawn, he came out of his room and sat on the bare wood floor, as the book said to, and fixed his gaze on the shadowed wall in front of him. He drew his breath into his lower abdomen, pressed it down, and blew it out. This made one round. He did 48 rounds. The last breath he held. As he held it, he counted his heartbeats. The technique of heartbeat-counting was called a Tour. Seventy-two heartbeats made a Small Tour, 108 heartbeats a Grand Tour.

  By the time he got to 20, the pain began. He heard a voice that rationalized, saying it wasn’t worth it, urging him to give in. He held on, focusing on the count. The agony set in at 30—31, 32, 33…He experienced his first convulsion. His mouth wanted to open, and he clenched it shut. At 40, he was entering the deeper waters of anoxia. The spasms came every beat. He was making choking sounds. In between, the pain turned almost pleasurable and he felt himself sailing in a dark blue world. His thoughts were growing panicked and incoherent. He tried to focus on the count. If he could just make it to 60, he thought, the rest would be possible.

  He bucked in place as if he were going to vomit. His eyes rolled back. His head was filled with noise. A voice in his mind cried, “Please, please, let me breathe!”

  The pain of not breathing overrode every effort at self-control. He was going to give up and then he wasn’t and then he was—and then he opened his mouth, and it was over. The vacuum in his chest sucked the air in. He experienced primal relief. There were tears in his eyes.

  He could barely remember what the count had been. Sixty-eight? Everything had gotten very confused at the end.

  Why couldn’t he have held on for just a few more seconds? Something deep down in his neural matter was defeating him, short-circuiting his will.

  The purpose of the exercise was to have enlightenment come rushing from the belly up the main channel of the body like mercury rising in a thermometer and flower at the crown of the head.

  * * *

  —

  In 2007, Gloria had taken her son and moved to Quincy, a suburb ten miles south of Boston, in time for Corey to enroll in junior high. She rented a run-down, teepee-shaped mini-house with a sandy concrete driveway just big enough to tuck her hatchback in. A concrete seawall stood chest height on the road. The ocean—Quincy Bay—lay to the east. She took a social service job, a forty-hour job that was more like fifty when you added the commute up 93. At home, she lay down on their futon, a piece of secondhand furniture that used to belong to a graduate student at Harvard Medical School who had left it on the sidewalk in Jamaica Plain. And she lay there watching TV.

  The job was to pay the rent. They were there for the school system, which was better than Dorchester. She’d done it for her son.

  The move to Quincy—it isolated her. Four years. The loneliest time of her life. She hadn’t expected this depression, how it cropped up when everything was fine, just from small things being wrong. First World problems—sadness. Her friends lived back in JP. They were all gone now. Here, the neighbors were Boston Irish, and Gloria said they scared her: “They’re too tough for me.”

  Once, she confessed her distress to a neighbor lady who helped her look for the electricity meter. An older, square-jawed woman with her white hair cut short around the column of her head and a small billow of white on top, and the patchy, sun-spotted skin of a sailor—a woman who herself was Boston Irish—the kind who went to Star Market and if the checkout girl didn’t know what something cost, said, “That means it’s free, right?”—even she agreed with Gloria that the neighborhood men were hard.

  But Corey had grown up here, and once in a while he went out with them on small construction jobs, to hang drywall in the back room of a local business, like the Rent-A-Center, or fix a broken sidewalk by pouring concrete in the broken part. They gave him a shovel and a wheelbarrow. He chopped open a bag of Sakrete and mixed the powder with the water from a hose. “You don’t want it runny,” they said, and turned off the water. Corey had a lot of fathers—he found them everywhere. He did odd jobs for them and they taught him to change the oil.

  Now he was in high school and, as always, he was still her friend. When he came home, thumping up the steps and burst in swinging his arms, she thought he sounded as if he was going to knock the place down and put up a better one for her.

  Recently, he had taken a ride with a carful of local kids up 93, across the Neponset River, all the way to Central Square in Cambridge, her old stomping grounds. They listened to a live ska band play at the Middle East Café in the company of coeds from Boston University, and he had come home talking about college girls.

  * * *

  —

  Watercraft were everywhere in Quincy, but Corey had never sailed. When he started high school, he was a virgin; the flower that bloomed above his head held the glowing body of a woman. Her face changed with the faces of the girls he went to school with. He let his breath-holding meditation lapse because it wasn’t helping him with the major questions now: Did you make the team, get the grade, get the sneakers, get the girl? Have you tried X? Are you hip? And does she like you?

  On the outside he looked like every other townie in an NFL warm-up jacket, smoking a cigarette with some other kid holding a pit bull on a leash. He told no one how, in quitting his secret Buddhist regimen, he felt he had betrayed himself.

  Freshman year, a classmate named Mark Fahey and his dad took him out on a one-masted Mercury off Wollaston Beach. Mark’s father, dressed like his son in cargo shorts and shoes without socks, had just completed a hunger walk for his church. Both Faheys used the boating trip to try to get Corey to open up. He admitted he really liked sailing but that this was his first time on the water. They told him the thing to do was “to get involved more.” Corey should join the Navy.

  Corey’s skateboard was his substitute vessel. He found The Norfolk Bible of Seafaring at the local library. In the summer, he rode his skateboard in traffic down the Adams Shore, his hands black from climbing trees, stopping at garages, looking for a job pumping gas, dreaming of a Mountain Dew.

  In the fall, he turned into a sophomore. Someone gave him OxyContin and he took it.

  * * *

  —

  It was possible that Gloria owed their move to Quincy to a friend. Over a decade ago, before the turn of the millennium, she had been living in an apartment in Cleveland Circle—an apartment of many rooms, stone-hard plaster walls, cracked paint on the radiators, few windows,
an old cooking smell in the stairwell with its mosaic pattern of tiny marble tiles—and a racing bike in the hall that belonged to her new roommate, Joan, a short strong woman with broad shoulders and trim waist, who was an as-yet-unknown quantity. A pleasant but tactfully distant accord obtained between her and Joan—until one night when Leonard came over to speak to Gloria in his characteristic way about science. He sat on their velvet couch and began discoursing on Feynman diagrams. Gloria was kneeling at his feet, playing with little Corey.

  Joan came out of the shower and strode into the living room, wearing a short black kimono, her wet hair smelling like strawberry shampoo, and interrupted.

  “Feynman—what’s that mean? Is that like, ‘Yo, she’s fine, man’?”

  “Not exactly. It’s named after Richard Feynman, who was a genius. Probably one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived. And the Feynman diagrams have to do with quantum mechanics.”

  “So it’s not like the finest silks, man? The finest silks a lady can wear?”