The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

  “Will that help at all? Icing it?” she asked the neurologist.

  “It might not hurt.” He held her atrophied hand in both of his and studied the dent that had formed in the adductor pollicis, the triangular muscle between her index finger and her thumb.

  She had fasciculations in her bad hand, and the tremors were climbing up her forearm. But, so far, just the forearm, the muscles connected to the fingers—the flexor sublimis digitorum, had she known the name. The internal sensation which had first crept over her—that manic feeling in the flesh—the electric energy—she was waiting to feel where it would happen next.

  She bought The Book of Ayurvedic Healing at Whole Foods. She bought a book on essential oils and aromatherapy. She bought a book by the Maharishi. She bought a set of metal spheres, so-called Kung-fu Exercise Balls, in a red velvet box; they were to be rotated in the hand to build dexterity and health. They contained little chimes, which warned the user if she wasn’t manipulating them smoothly. They cost her $45 in Chinatown. They were too heavy for her bad hand, so she never used them. But of the chimes, which Corey said were girly, she said, “Don’t you understand? I need them so much.” And he was so sorry for laughing then. She racked up five hundred dollars on her credit card buying healing books published by Singing Dragon Press and the Higher Balance Institute.

  A twenty-one-year-old associate at the market, who considered herself “a passionate expert in healing,” told Gloria she “absolutely had to had to” get clary sage oil.

  Labor Day was almost upon them now.

  Gloria returned to the yoga studio in JP and bought a month’s worth of classes. They were expensive. The instructor wore green-and-orange tights, which made her think of tropical fruit—and the rain forest, where chemical compounds with extraordinary properties have developed over the millennia. The instructor put Florence and the Machine on the sound system, arched her ripe flexible body and lifted herself into a handstand, her legs projecting sideways like a break-dancer above the polished maple floor.

  “We’re not here to show off,” she said. “Try it if it serves you. This is the Eight Angle Pose.”

  “I’m out of practice,” Gloria said.

  “There’s no such thing.”

  At home, Gloria faced her son in the kitchen. “My yoga instructor said I’m the most focused student she’s seen in a long time. I try everything, even things that are too hard for me. I tried a really hard one today and fell on my face: the Astavakrasana. Your mom’s no quitter.”

  She had stopped at the Purple Cactus. She took a wet bunch of Paleolithic kale out of her reusable shopping bag and put it in the refrigerator. She unrolled her mat on the kitchen floor and kneeled and bowed in a posture of obeisance to something greater.

  The next day she was too tired to execute a Cobra. She couldn’t rotate her biceps forward, lock her arms, point her toes and lift her heart. By the third week, she didn’t want to go to class. She moved her mat to the back of the studio and limited herself to Downward-Facing Dog until she could get her strength back. She caught the instructor eyeing her; she wasn’t her favorite anymore. But even Down Dog got too exhausting. She spent the rest of the hour in the half lotus, whispering ong namo guru dev namo, telling herself that golden streams of prana were flowing through her hands.

  The instructor suggested that maybe Gloria should try something less intense than Vinyasa Flow.

  A few days later, she dropped a fork. She and Corey looked at each other across the table. She had been holding it with her good hand. “Oh no,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  The dormer got built, Darragh didn’t need him anymore, and the summer ended.

  The first week of school, the principal met with Corey’s class. The students sat in the bleachers in the indoor basketball court, looking at how each other’s bodies had changed over the summer—the shoulders, the hair, the girls leaning forward on the bleachers, the tattooed butterflies and roses that had appeared on their lower backs.

  “Welcome back,” said the principal, Mr. Gregorio, who wore a yellow dress shirt and black slacks and a laminated ID card. “This is going to be a special year. We did a lot of work over the summer to make this an even more outstanding year than last year. I want to remind you of your opportunities at this school. Football, basketball, volleyball, wrestling—you literally have everything. In other districts, it’s not the same. Take Braintree. If you want to try welding, they make you go to vo-tech. Not here. We let you decide on your major as late as senior year.”

  It was all made possible by block scheduling, he said. He held up a schedule card.

  “You all need to have one of these. We’ve spent a lot of time on these, so that you can avail yourself of the opportunities.”

  His staff stood at the wings of the court. The men were dressed like him in ties and extra-large dress shirts to contain their chests and shoulders, tightly buttoned at their necks and wrists.

  After Mr. G spoke, out came the guidance counselor, a straight-backed Chinese woman with a Boston accent, who told the juniors it wasn’t too soon to start thinking about college.

  Corey went to his scheduled classes, shook all the same hands as last year, ate his lunch and did his bit of homework. But the semester seemed to get underway without him. He saw Molly with the girls’ volleyball team, wearing warm-up suits and white towels and running stairs. Because of their different schedules, he only saw her at a distance. He tried to wave. He heard she was busy applying to UMass. He went home to his empty house in the afternoons.

  On Saturdays throughout the month of September he helped out a friend of Tom’s at a construction site in Milton—organizing a job trailer, creating order, sorting screws and nails and tubes of silicon, putting each thing where it went. It was the high point of his week, but the job ended.

  Tom was under the gun with a new project and it was best not to bother him until further notice, so Corey looked for his next job on his own. He didn’t try that hard to find one.

  One day after school he turned on the computer and Googled his mother’s disease. He found a website hosted by the National Institutes of Health and watched a video of a thing that looked like an X-ray image of a leg bone—a whitish transparent pipe with a bulbous end. It converged on a pink striated cable made of bundled strands, almost touching it. Golden flashes of light pulsed in the gap between the transparent bulb and the pink striated cable. With each flash, the pink cable contracted like a beating heart. The pipe was a nerve, the cable was a muscle. The pipe started changing color, shriveling and turning gray, blackening like a dying tooth. The flashes went dim, like a bulb burning out. The pink cable stopped squeezing, and then it changed color too, darkening like unrefrigerated meat.

  After watching the video, he sat for what seemed like hours with his head in his hands.

  When he looked up, he noticed the rigging tied to his bed, which had been there since Mother’s Day last spring. He sprang up and pulled apart the knots and threw the ropes and pulleys and all his nautical books away in his closet and closed the door on them forever as far as he was concerned.

  * * *

  —

  The sky projected a gray movie down on the shore, the color of concrete, the color of the sea—and he watched it, watched it like a woman on a widow’s walk, frozen into inaction except for pacing with her eyes on the horizon waiting for her husband’s ship. The autumn winds picked up. Out on the Cape, a squall was hitting the boats that weren’t in yet. Sitting alone in his room for how long he didn’t know, he listened for Scarlatta. He stood up when she came in, the night having fallen. As she came in out of the black outdoors wrapped in her winter coat, he looked to see if she was doing badly or not, if there had been more bad news.

  Sometimes she made dinner, sometimes not. She didn’t want to talk about what was happening. They didn’t hear a thing from Leonard.
<
br />   As the weeks passed, the fall turned very dark. To Corey, it seemed as if an invisible hand was turning down the lights of the world. His mother went out at night, and Corey didn’t know where she was going, that she was sitting by herself at the Half Door, while a local DJ played early eighties breakbeat and the young electricians and landscapers drank around her. They wore heavy black hooded sweatshirts and plaid shirts.

  One night, a guy watching Gloria at the bar signaled his friend. He had seen her wrapping both her hands around a beer bottle in order to lift it. They watched her drink. The men smiled at one another.

  She would have looked so small at the bar with her short blonde hair and her spine beginning to hunch from loss of muscle.

  “Want me to hold that for you?”

  “I bet you could.”

  A few days later, through her bedroom wall, Corey heard his mother talking on the phone, saying maybe she ought to shoot the moon and go to Thailand while there was still time. Not Lhasa—the hippie trail, China Beach. Get a boyfriend. Get her groove back.

  The conversation frightened him.

  “Right!” he heard his mother say. “OD on China White. I should.”

  5

  Adrian Thomas Reinhardt

  The next day, he asked his mother to give him Leonard’s number.

  “Take it. I don’t think it works. He hasn’t been answering. Maybe he’ll pick up if he knows it’s you.”

  Corey went outside to dial. The number went to a generic voicemail.

  “It’s Corey. My mother’s not okay. Is there anything we can do? Are you there? If you get this, can you call me?”

  Kids weren’t allowed to bring cell phones to Corey’s school, but the security guards didn’t inspect backpacks, and he was able to sneak his phone in without much trouble. He had a Samsung smartphone with the screen smashed in one corner. It had fallen from his jeans when he jumped his skateboard. During the day, he checked it in the bathroom stall six or seven times. After twenty-four hours without any word from Leonard, Corey took the subway forty minutes north to MIT.

  He walked from Kendall Square to Mass Ave, to the university’s main building. From the outside, it evoked a Roman temple. Corey climbed the stone steps and walked beneath the entrance columns. He hauled open a bronze door and stepped inside a high domed lobby, which echoed like a train station or a museum. The sunset cast a rectangle of orange on the marble floor. The rest was shadow. The silence had a sacred character. It felt like a place to fly in—a giant cranium, expanded by thought. A mason had chiseled everything the granite brain knew on a ribbon of stone around the brow: Architecture, Agriculture, Industry, Engineering, Mathematics…

  He’d seen those words before. Many years ago, his mother had brought him here along with Joan to show her where she’d met Leonard. They’d been on a tour of places related to Gloria’s failed romance. “Look at that,” Joan had said, squatting down to Corey’s height and pointing up at the workmanship of the dome. “Trippy! I feel like I should light a candle.”

  But they hadn’t seen Leonard that day. Corey had never in his entire life seen his father at his job.

  Crossing the lobby, he started down the Infinite Hallway, passing the admissions office, the office of student life, and so on, the names stenciled on frosted-glass doors in understated elegant capital letters like headlines from an old newspaper.

  He saw a restroom that said Men on the glass. A laser-printed notice tacked to the antique doorframe asked “Do you want to find a gender-neutral restroom on campus?”

  The hallway became a gallery of posters for everything you could do at MIT. He stopped to look at a photo of a boat cutting through bright choppy water, white sails taut, coming straight at the camera, the bow wave foaming, young people in sunglasses and life preservers sitting on the rail.

  “Interested in sailing?” he read. “Come to the Sailing Pavilion on Memorial Drive.”

  Interspersed among the flyers for folk singing and rocketry, he saw several notices that asked “Are You Depressed?”

  Further on, he came to a laboratory on display like an open kitchen in a fancy restaurant. Closed for the night, its microscopes rested in shadow on immaculate graphite tabletops. Fume hoods climbed to the ceiling. In the back loomed a giant industrial drill.

  Wandering on another floor, he stumbled across a very quiet set of rooms. The door was open and he went in, but he knew he shouldn’t be here. In the kitchenette, a coffeemaker shone with a cobalt ready light, and a handwritten note on the cabinet said, Coffee today, Nobel Prize tomorrow. It looked like a psychiatrist’s office, trimmed in blond wood and carpeted in cooling gray tones. Around one corner, he had a distant view through multiple glass walls into the heart of the building, distorted by layering and refraction. Blackboards were arrayed in a Stonehenge circle and in their center was a ring of soft chairs, the same cool muted buckwheat as the carpets. Scientists would sit in them to contemplate the blackboards. They were covered in six-foot-long equations. A warning to janitors: Do Not Erase. It was quiet as a chapel.

  A raw concrete pillar rose through the floor, giving the effect of stone, as in a church. An open staircase led through the ceiling to a higher floor that promised an even more extreme silence and an even cleaner light.

  He beheld a set of papers displayed on a wall. The center one was entitled: Dark Matter and Non-Hilbert Space with Implications for Black Holes.

  Taped to a door, he saw a cartoon: “Physicists make bad parents.” It depicted a man, woman and, in the background, a child, the woman saying, “We can ignore Charles because he’s small.”

  A corkboard by the exit held photos of the department’s members, Polaroids. They smiled shyly or looked tousled, frozen behind their glasses, some young, some old, mainly male. He saw no more than three women—Chinese or Israeli. The names weren’t Boston Irish but were full of t’s and v’s and k’s. He examined the faces, seeing one liver-spotted scientist in a cardigan treating the camera to a knowing laugh. Corey went down the line of portraits until he realized: Leonard wouldn’t be in any of them.

  Another piece of humor caught his eye: “Having abandoned my search for truth, I am now looking for a good fantasy.”

  In the hall outside, he looked back and saw the place he had just been in was called the Department of Theoretical Physics.

  Nearby he saw more flyers: Are you feeling down? How about looking for God?

  In the basement, he saw acetylene torches, kilns, signs of researchers but not the researchers themselves: their fans, coffeepots, ten-speed bicycles and socket sets. Nowhere did he find a security guard or an office of campus security, just laboratories and an endless stream of flyers for clubs, activities, internships, stress reduction and the search for God or meaning from the department of community wellness. He walked miles of internal halls. Sometimes the walls would change, plaster to concrete, and he would know he was in another building. Sometimes he could see outside and tell where he had moved in relation to the neoclassical structure where he had started.

  Eventually, he backtracked and found his way back through the antiseptic white tunnel of the gynepathology research center to the physics department.

  Along the way, he stopped before a series of giant laminated posters called The History and Fate of the Universe. The stars looked like the distant campus safety lights he had seen outside the window. Next to a gray planet, he read: The moon and its seas. The atmosphere on Venus is extremely dense. Absolutely no water is present. A thin red line cutting through the nuclear fireball at the heart of space showed the boundary between our universe and a universe that collapsed under the force of gravity and imploded, crushing everything in existence back down to the size of an atom.

  One floor lower down, he met Adrian Thomas Reinhardt.

  * * *

  —

  As he exited the stairwell, Corey passed a stadium-
style auditorium whose door had been left ajar. The hundreds of seats were empty, but on the stage, there was a figure standing underneath the lights. From a distance, Corey thought he was a young professor in a motorcycle jacket writing on the blackboard. Sensing that he was being observed, the professor turned around and his eyes found Corey in the doorway.

  “What are you drawing?” Corey asked.

  After the two of them had finished laughing, their conversation took off right away. The young man wasn’t a professor at all; he was just a high school senior with five o’clock shadow taking AP Physics at Cambridge Rindge & Latin. He was applying early action to MIT, which explained why he was here; he’d been meeting with a professor—some old guy upstairs—who was giving him a recommendation based on an independent project he had done on the chemistry of high explosives.

  “Basically, I looked at these explosive formulas with nitrogen and phosphorus, and I said if these things are explosive over here, then these other things should be explosive too.”

  Within half a minute, the precocious young man was talking about improving memory, training the concentration, using the mind at its peak potential to go infinitely far into intellectual space. You have all these connections in your head, he declared. You want to have a sense of power. He said his name was Adrian, and Corey listened. He talked in terms of neurotransmitters rather than prana. Serotonin came from bananas. The chemicals degraded, so he ate them every twelve hours. In addition to being a physics honors student, he was a 190-pound bodybuilder. Strength began in the psyche before it reached the biceps. You could train your brain to output a higher voltage to your muscles. Through arousal, it was possible to unleash superhuman forces.