Love and Hydrogen

by Jim Shepard

  The next day I got the pile of clothes back together. It ended up filling a lawn bag. My mom came upstairs and asked what I was doing.

  I told her. She sat on the bed. She watched for a little while. She said things like, “You want to get rid of that?”

  “Is your friend going to take this the right way?” she said. “Did you tell her you were going to do this?”

  I told her yes. She smiled. This was another one of her daughter’s stupid ideas.

  “Well, don’t go crazy,” she finally said. She got up and went downstairs.

  Immediately my brother wandered into my room. I’m supposed to have privacy, but it’s like a train station.

  “Get out of here,” I said. “I don’t go in your room.”

  “What do you want from me?” he said. “Go in my room.”

  I didn’t let him see what was in the bag.

  He had my stuffed Snoopy from when I was little by the ears and he was pounding its forehead on the headboard. “Whaddaya doing?” he said. “Giving your clothes to the less fortunate?”

  “None of your business,” I said. Then I said, “Like you’d ever do anything for anybody.”

  “Why don’t you do a telethon?” he said.

  I got a book off my shelf and read until he left.

  I complained about him to my mother and she reminded me he was going through a tough time. He had seven things he went out for his first year in high school and didn’t get into any.

  On Monday I told Crystal about him. I said, “Maybe we’re both losers,” meaning him and me.

  “I doubt it,” she said.

  I’d left the bag of clothes home again. “I was going to bring the clothes this time,” I finally said when we were getting ready to go.

  “I should give you something,” Crystal said.

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that,” I said. What was she going to give me? Something she whittled?

  She asked if I wanted to stay over Friday night.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Give me your number,” she said, and I gave her a number.

  I have like three friends, and they never call. They had to be practically dragged to my birthday party.

  It was okay with my mother. “I am going to have a drink,” she said, when I asked her what she thought. I told her it was Crystal, the girl she met. “I assumed,” she said.

  Later we ran it by my father, up in his study. Somebody on his team had totally screwed up a deposition, so he had to make another whole trip to someplace like Iowa. He asked who Crystal was. He said it was fine with him. “Spending the night with the poor,” he said, and he gave me a hug.

  “Very nice,” my mother said to herself as we came back downstairs.

  That Friday I loaded the lawn bag into the trunk. My mother would pick us up after the lessons and take us to Crystal’s, and then pick me up Saturday afternoon after some errands.

  Crystal was nervous in class. She was fidgety afterward, waiting for my mother. I was flattered.

  My mother was right on time, which I told Crystal wouldn’t happen in a million years. “How are you, Mrs. Gerwig?” she said when she got in the car.

  “I’m fine, Crystal,” my mom said. “How about you?”

  Crystal said she was fine, too.

  “It’s nice of your parents to invite Lynn over,” my mother told her once we pulled onto the highway.

  “I so love the twilight this time of year, don’t you?” Crystal said back. I almost lost it.

  We got off at the Riverside exit. I didn’t know anyone who lived down there, poor or not. All you could see from the highway was oil tanks.

  Crystal gave directions while my mom turtled along like the whole thing was a trap. I kept hoping the houses wouldn’t get any worse.

  “Mom, the gas pedal. On the right,” I said.

  My mother just drove.

  We were all quiet.

  “Right here,” Crystal said.

  I peeped out of my window. What was I scared of? There weren’t going to be enough cable channels?

  On the way there I’d told myself that there wouldn’t be anything so terrible about the house. I was wrong. It was a long white trailer. It had a yellow stripe. There were empty plastic buckets around the front porch. Something rusty was half buried in the yard. My mother pulled up so even the car wasn’t too close to the curb. Her face was fine.

  When she got out of the car Crystal’s dad came out of the house. He looked like any other dad. He had on a Nirvana T-shirt. While they said hello I got the keys from my mom’s hand and opened the trunk. I pulled out the bag and lugged it to the front door.

  Her dad’s name was Tom.

  “Where you goin’ with that?” her dad said.

  “Lynn’s givin’ me some clothes,” Crystal said. “The ones that don’t fit her anymore.”

  My mother was wincing. Like Crystal and her father were blind.

  I was still at the front door of the trailer. I could see people inside.

  “It’s just a lot of weird stuff, Dad,” Crystal said.

  “Hey, I don’t care,” Crystal’s dad said. “If it’s all right with Lynn’s mother here,” he said.

  “It’s fine with me,” my mother said. After a second she crossed the yard to give me a hug. She looked at me. “You behave yourself,” she said. She got back in the car and drove off.

  “So what’re we havin’ for dinner?” Crystal’s dad said.

  “We should have hot dogs,” Crystal said.

  We all went in the house.

  Her mother and her retarded brother were in the living room with the shades down, watching TV. I thought it was weird that her mother hadn’t come out.

  “Nice to meet you,” I told them.

  They were both fat, but not hugely fat. The brother had black hair combed sideways and his eyes were half closed. I couldn’t tell if that was part of the way he was retarded or if he was just sleepy. His mother was sitting next to the biggest ashtray on earth. It was wider than the lamp table it was on.

  Crystal said I should get the bag from the porch. She told them while I went to get it that I’d given her this huge bag of clothes. They were looking at me when I came back in.

  “Merry Christmas!” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else. I put it on the rug in front of the TV.

  The house smelled. There were dirty coffee cups on the windowsill. I had my hands flat against my thighs.

  Her father poked in from the kitchen and said, “What’s in the bag?” but then didn’t wait to find out. He called he was starting dinner.

  Her brother dug around in the bag. Her mother watched. I still didn’t know his name. I was still standing by the front door. Crystal felt bad at the way things were going but I couldn’t do anything to help her feel better.

  “So what’s in there?” she said, like everything was okay. It was horrible.

  Her brother pulled out stuff I didn’t even remember throwing in. Some things I could still wear, and a blue velvet dress.

  “Oh,” her mother said, when her brother held up the dress.

  A Penthouse magazine was lying around in plain sight. The room was cold and everyone was bundled up. You could smell sweat. The kitchen was on one side and they had framed pictures of Crystal and her brother around the door leading to the other rooms. It was a longer trailer than it looked.

  The kitchen was clean. We ate in there, watching the TV on the counter. I looked every so often at the floors and the ceiling, and Crystal caught me at it.

  We had pound cake for dessert. Her father and brother got into a fight about how much her brother could have.

  Afterward we hung out in Crystal’s room. It was across from her mom and dad’s. Her brother was going to sleep on the sofa. I thanked her parents for the very nice dinner, even though I hadn’t seen her mother do anything. They said we should get ready for bed soon.

  That was fine with me. It was about 7:30.

  Her half of the room was neat.
She had a throw rug, and her bed was made, with some books arranged big to small on a bookshelf in the headboard. Her brother’s side was filthy. You could see that she’d tried to pick up. There were loose Oreos in some slippers under the dresser.

  “You can sleep on my bed,” Crystal said.

  A poster of a muscle car flapped out from the ceiling over her brother’s bed, like a sail. I told her I could sleep over there, but she said no.

  I was still standing in the middle of the room. I didn’t want to be there, and she knew it.

  “Do you want to see some of my books, or play a game?” she said. “I got Clue.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  She didn’t move. She sat on her brother’s bed. I sat on hers. I smelled soap.

  “Should we go to bed?” I finally said. She shrugged, looking down at my feet.

  We brushed our teeth and got into our nightgowns. Even the water tasted weird. I was glad I brought my own towel. We called good night down the hall and got into bed. Then she had to get up to turn off the light. She got into bed again. The parking garage across the street lit up the whole room.

  “Are you having an okay time?” she said, from her brother’s bed.

  “Yeah,” I said. She shifted around on her back. They were watching some kind of travelogue in the living room and we both lay there, listening to it. I think she felt so bad she couldn’t even ask them to turn it down.

  “My cousin Katie has so much money,” she said.

  “Did you hear me?” she said.

  “What am I supposed to say?” I said.

  She sighed. It was like a bubble filling the house, pressing on my ears. I hated it there.

  “I don’t know why I say some things,” she said. She started to cry.

  “Are you crying?” I said. “What are you crying for?”

  It just made her cry to herself. I hadn’t asked very nicely.

  “Why are you crying?” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, like she was going to answer, but she didn’t.

  We both lay there. I made a disgusted noise. I breathed in her smell on the pillow. She was quiet after that. The travelogue went off. I wondered if her brother had to stay up until her parents went to bed.

  It was so bright in the room I could read my watch. When it was 11:30, I said, “I should go.”

  “What do you want from me?” she said, exactly the way my brother does.

  I got up and got dressed without turning on the light. “I should use the phone,” I said. She was still on her back.

  I went out into the hall. The house was dark. The phone was in the kitchen. My mother answered on the second ring. I kept my voice down. I was worried she was going to make me explain, but she didn’t. She said, “Are you all right?” Then she said my father would come.

  It would take about a half hour. I had to wait. I hung up and went back into the bedroom and shut the door. “My father’s coming,” I said.

  “Fine,” Crystal said. She was sitting up. “You want the light on?”

  “No,” I said.

  We sat there. I thought about the way I’d thought of her the night before. The night before I’d thought she needed beauty in her life.

  “Take your clothes with you when you go,” she said.

  “This is totally me. I’m just being weird,” I said.

  I was going to quit the classes the next day by phone. If she tried to call me she’d find out the number I’d given her was fake. Like we said when a total dork asked for our number: I gave him my faux number. And she’d think I couldn’t deal with her being so poor. She wouldn’t realize it was everything else I couldn’t deal with. I knew I deserved exactly what I got, all the rest of my life. And when I was stuck with her in her bedroom I didn’t want her to deserve any more, either. But before that, for a little while, I wanted good things for her; I wanted to make her life a little better. I wanted to make her think, That Lynn—that Lynn’s a nice girl. And wasn’t that worth something?

  DESCENT INTO PERPETUAL NIGHT

  Impractical but Exciting Early Machines

  When I was a boy I came across in my father’s library an engraving of Father Gaspard Schott’s design for what he termed an “aquatic corselet,” composed of leather with four tiny panes of looking-glass, which let its passenger walk safely about the floor of the sea. It looked like a huge and inverted four-sided pail. In the engraving two bare feet tiptoed along a sandy bottom. According to the caption it had been published in 1664.

  It was my first experience with what I came to understand as my near-constant state: that of being inarticulate with amazement. “Inarticulate is right,” Mary, my first wife, and Elswyth, my second, and Miss Hollister, my present assistant, each remarked, upon being told that story. In the case of Miss Hollister, I congratulated her on having confirmed data that had apparently been obtained at great cost by earlier observers.

  The Bathysphere in Its White Coat

  My name is William S. Beebe and I am the head of the Department of Tropical Research for the New York Zoological Society. During 1927 and 1928 I considered various plans for cylinders that would be strong enough to sink deep into the ocean, but all of them, due to their flat ends, proved impractical. It soon occurred to me and others that there is nothing like a ball for the even distribution of pressure, and so the idea of a perfectly round chamber took form and grew. By 1929 Mr. Otis Barton at his own expense had developed and actually constructed a steel sphere large and strong enough for us to enter. The final design measured only four feet nine inches in diameter, but its walls were an inch and a quarter thick, and it weighed five thousand pounds. Any heavier would have been too heavy for the winches available in the Caribbean. Our dive would take place off one of the abyssal shelves a few miles from the Bermudan coast.

  There were to be three windows: cylinders of fused quartz three inches thick fitted into steel projections resembling the mouths of stubby cannons, quartz being the strongest transparent substance known, and transmitting all wavelengths of light. The windows were eight inches wide. Because of the sphere’s shape they turned in toward one another slightly, as if cross-eyed.

  Opposite the windows was what was politely termed the door. It had a circular four-hundred-pound flanged lid that was lifted on and off with a block and tackle, and fitted with ten fist-sized bolts around the hole. It was fourteen inches wide.

  A swivel at the top of the sphere held the lowering cable. Beside that the electric cable, carrying light and telephone wires, entered through what we called the stuffing box, formed of an inner brass and an outer stainless-steel gland between which the cable was sandwiched with layers of flax and oil packing and tightly bolted with hammered wrenches.

  Below that, inside, oxygen tanks were bolted lengthwise to the walls, like benches. Trays in which powdered chemicals for absorbing moisture and carbon dioxide were exposed sat on brackets just above our heads. A crate-sized box of a searchlight occupied nearly all of one side. It had its own window.

  One day I was drawing with my finger the shape of a deep-sea fish— Bathytroctes—on the stall in the gentlemen’s room, when the appropriateness of the prefix struck me. I coined the name, bathysphere. The name stuck.

  We painted the thing white, in the hope that it would attract sea life.

  Corals and Fish Four Fathoms Down

  When a previously impenetrable portion of a zone foreign to human presence suddenly becomes accessible, then every corner of man’s mind susceptible to enthusiasm or to long-accumulated curiosity is aroused to the highest pitch. Those zones might be geographical, technical, historical, or emotional.

  Our knowledge of deep-sea fauna was comparable to an African explorer’s after he’d penetrated a mile into the continent’s jungles, and seen two birds and a lizard. Were there rhinos? Lions? Elephants? How would he know?

  Science had steamed about, lowered weights on a wire, and recorded the depth of the bottom. We’d dragged along tiny dredges and nets, and stared at whatever mise
rable and crushed specimens were slow enough to be caught by them. Because of the pressures recorded, the deepest any human being had made observations before the bathysphere had been a little beyond three hundred feet. We knew the ocean’s depth in some places was likely to reach a mile and a half: eight thousand feet.

  The Evolution of Human Diving

  I was born in Brooklyn, New York, eighteen years after Darwin had published his Origin of the Species and six after he’d published The Descent of Man. Rutherford B. Hayes had just completed his first year in office. Colorado had just achieved statehood, and had chosen as its state bird the prairie lark finch, that gregarious ground feeder. A great cholera epidemic had just ended, and my mother had taken to calling me “Little Lucky.” My luck had held, as it always would. In 1899 at the age of twenty-two I became the youngest curator of ornithology in the New York Zoological Society’s history, and proceeded to make expeditions to Central and South America, the Orient, and the West Indies. After a while, as a joke, some of my coworkers back in New York had sold my desk.

  Cruikshank’s Idea of Life in a Bell

  Miss Hollister believed I hadn’t been doing my utmost to affect her parents’ situation. I protested this interpretation more than once. I’d written a letter. I’d mentioned the situation to the head of the Society. I’d offered to telephone whomever she would wish. It wasn’t clear to me how much more I could accomplish.

  Her parents wished to emigrate but her father had run afoul of his government because of a petition he circulated to protest the requisitioning of a wetlands hatchery. The hatchery was in a valley south of Mainz.

  “A petition?” I asked, during one of our first discussions on the subject.

  “Apparently it identified the reason for the requisitioning as military maneuvers,” she told me.

  I tried to look sympathetic, not seeing the point.

  “Strictly verboten, according to the Treaty of Versailles,” she explained.

  “Ah,” I said.

  This had been on the voyage down to Bermuda. She had been watching me double-check my figures for projected oxygen consumption.