The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

  “Yes, we could easily be in a boat.” Adrian burst out laughing. And he began to lampoon Corey’s statement in the first person: “I’m in my boat! Don’t bother me!”

  Corey tried to clarify what he’d meant, but made no headway with his friend.

  At their destination, they debarked and walked out of the empty, white-lit station, into the night.

  “This is where a lot of stuff goes down,” Corey said. “Usually there’s a cop.” Adrian turned his hat backwards.

  “There’s nothing but bars down there. Come on.” They descended the hill.

  “That’s my school.” It was a clean modern structure fronted by a dark lawn and a granite statue of an apple. They stopped and looked. Lights shone deep inside the building. A digital signboard scrolled the words Quincy High Pride.

  Adrian could tell a lot of street fights happened here. He began to talk about mechanics. The key to delivering a maximally destructive blow was twisting around the axis of your trunk. Physicists represented the quantity of angular momentum using the variable omega. He stood in place describing how to calculate it. Corey wanted to get them moving again, but Adrian wouldn’t move until he finished talking.

  As they were crossing the Southern Artery, Adrian caught sight of a Burger King and wanted to stop and feed his muscles. He laughed when Corey said it would slow them down. Corey waited while his friend consumed a double cheeseburger.

  They continued down the shore, passing between the police station and the cemetery named after a Captain Wollaston, an old field gun on the rise amid the graves. They passed the turn for Corey’s job site, but he didn’t point it out because he didn’t want his friend to seize on any more distractions.

  “It’s only a half mile to my house.”

  But Adrian had seen the sign for Grumpy White’s and stopped. “Are you telling me that’s their name? That’s the funniest thing I ever heard!” He began whooping with laughter. He pretended to hold his stomach, as if to demonstrate he was in such pain he couldn’t touch it. “I’m going to be grumpy! That’s so like—” and he began one of his analyses.

  “They’ve got an awesome sub,” Corey interjected. Adrian overruled him. He said the owners of Grumpy White’s were stuck in the anal stage of development.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s like a little kid who has to shit himself to show he’s mad.”

  But then, to Corey’s relief, they reached the bottom of the hill.

  “Oh look! My father’s car is there; you’ll be able to meet him.” The Sable, a shadow, was parked behind his mother’s hatchback. He led his friend inside.

  The inside of the house looked like a walnut—glossy dark brown. You couldn’t see anything in the shadow, which inundated the premises. It felt like a small cabin. A single lamp sat on the end table, and yellow light was escaping from the top of the lampshade leaving a glow on the wood veneer wall in the shape of a thumbprint. The room was empty. A book lay on the futon: Mathematical Physics. But the place was silent as if no one was there.

  “Just a minute.” Corey left Adrian hulking in the center of the floor, crossed the room, tapped on his mother’s door. “Mom?” He opened her door just enough to slip in and closed it behind him. He found his mother in bed with her laptop. She was looking at images of slender flexible women doing yoga poses that made their bodies look like Sanskrit on a changing series of landscapes. He asked if she knew where Leonard was. Gloria didn’t know.

  As Adrian stood in the living room, Leonard walked out of the darkened kitchen and said, “Hello.”

  Corey heard voices commence speaking behind him. He said goodnight to his mother and closed her door carefully.

  In the outer room, Leonard was kicked back on Gloria’s futon with his foot on her coffee table, in mid-discussion with Adrian.

  “This is Adrian,” Corey interrupted. “He’s going to MIT.”

  “He knows already,” Adrian said. “So what you’re saying is, to account for the cosmological constant, you take all this energy you have lying around and divide it up into all these different worlds. That takes care of the infinity issue…hmm. I see that. That could work.”

  “Can you tell me what I missed?” Corey asked.

  “Four years of high school physics,” Leonard said.

  “Well, basically, we’re just saying, if you have this big thing that’s super huge that’s sitting in your equations, if you chop it up into enough pieces by using infinitely many equations, you can make it disappear.”

  “I can follow that.”

  “Have a look at the math and see what you make of it.” Leonard handed Adrian his book.

  Corey tried to see the text over his friend’s shoulder. Adrian said the p’s and q’s had to be world states. Leonard said, “Very good.” Adrian began to explain how he had guessed effectively. It had to do with making leaps based on what he already knew. He explained how his brain worked. Leonard simply watched him through his amber glasses.

  Adrian handed back the text. Corey intercepted it.

  He’d never looked in one of his father’s books before. He saw nothing but mathematics—a blizzard of p’s, q’s, x’s, y’s, Greek letters, calculus, symbols from a strange arithmetic, including an upside-down delta operator. There was no English he could see. The rows of equations looked like the remains of sentences from which all the vowels had been vacuumed out.

  Leonard had marked the page up thoroughly, just like Adrian had his Nietzsche. Unlike Adrian’s relentless block capitals, Leonard’s handwriting was irregular, jumping with internal disruptions. His words were different sizes, some big, fat, loopy, cursive; others small and tight and jagged and bent in one direction, as if written in a gale, then bent back the other way like grass; then screaming straight up and down, crushed together, and scribbled higher and higher like a spiking EKG. Corey couldn’t read a single one.

  He began to grow self-conscious. He closed the book and tried to hand it to his father. But Leonard didn’t move to take it, and Corey set it on the table at his feet.

  “You’re a wrestler,” Leonard said.

  “How’d you know?” Adrian exclaimed.

  Corey listened to them talk about wrestling and boxing, how it all came down to basic mechanics—to omega.

  “I’m wondering if I could move us to the kitchen. I don’t want to wake her.”

  “She’s not sleeping,” Leonard said.

  Corey waited for the right moment to interrupt again. He told Adrian he wanted to show him something in his room.

  “It looks like Corey’s getting anxious.”

  “Yes, it looks like I have to go now. You’ve given me a lot to think about. I’m going to want to look into this type of mathematics.”

  “Do that. You’ll have fun with it. I hope to see you at MIT.”

  “That’d be great.”

  Adrian followed Corey to his room.

  “What’s this you have to show me?”

  Corey took his block and tackle out of his closet.

  “Look at the mechanical advantage of this!”

  Adrian forced a smile. “Very good.”

  * * *

  —

  In the aftermath of Adrian’s visit, Corey wanted to know what his father had thought of his friend. He announced that Adrian was getting the best grades in his high school AP Physics class. Leonard said that didn’t exactly qualify him for the Manhattan Project but acknowledged that he had seemed intelligent. Raising his eyes from his Springer-Verlag text, he added, “He’s eccentric. I think I smelled him.”

  “He doesn’t like to wash.”

  “He won’t do very well with the opposite sex if he doesn’t wash.”

  “But he understood your book, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he seems remarkable,” Leonard said, returning his eyes to the page.


  Later, in Cambridge, Corey told Adrian, “My father likes you.” Adrian’s dimples appeared. “That’s awesome.” He smiled and made a stilted, self-conscious cheering gesture with two tentatively clenched fists, like a robot saying hurray.

  10

  Palm of Saint

  Gloria had not been sleeping. While looking at women doing yoga poses, balancing on one leg, she had been contemplating what had happened earlier that day. Upon arriving in Fields Corner, she had parked her car by the Planet Fitness, put money in the meter with her disobedient fingers and begun walking the hundred feet or so to the building where she worked. Her route passed in front of houses with bare trees jutting out of yards, silhouetted against the cold pale sky. The morning light was changing, the earth was tilting, the days starting earlier. It was already brighter than December. She had been having this thought when her legs stopped working and she fell.

  It was her first fall, and it was utterly disastrous. It happened just outside her job—within grabbing distance of the steel tube railing on the concrete handicap-accessible ramp. But she hadn’t had a prayer of grabbing it. She hadn’t been able to get up, had lain on the sidewalk weeping. Emotional shock, public embarrassment—she had felt slapped by her father, a man long dead. Strangers had helped her up and she had pulled herself together, refusing further assistance.

  Now, with her blonde head on the pillow, she remained awake deep into the night with her knees curled up. Her eyes kept opening and she kept closing them. She didn’t drop off until two or three. She woke up again and saw it was four already on the bedside clock, the lamp still on. She was still in her clothes, yesterday’s slacks, and it was nearly time for another day. And in the day that was to come she’d continue to keep her accident a secret. She wouldn’t tell her neurologist, wouldn’t tell her family—her son, that is. She’d keep it a secret, pretending it had never happened out of real fear about what it meant.

  But as the month played out, Corey would see his mother’s gait was changing. At the same time, he would become aware of a disquiet that centered on his father.

  * * *

  —

  A few days after Adrian’s visit, Corey was alone with his father after school and Leonard got on the subject of Richard Feynman, the working-class genius of immigrant parents who had contributed both to quantum theory and the atomic bomb, against all odds whether intellectual or economic.

  “You have to understand science is a human pursuit, therefore it’s an economic pursuit, therefore it’s subject to competitive economics. Consider capitalism—” If history was a lie, Leonard said, so was the history of science. Real science was done by armies of exploited workers, common folk whose names were never known. Unlike Feynman, a heroic revolutionary, James D. Watson, Bill Gates, Isaac Newton were robber barons who had stood on the shoulders of money.

  “Capitalism teaches us to lie, cheat and steal. Those of us without the silver spoon have to lie, cheat and steal more than the competition just to keep up. Just ask Paul Erdős.”

  “What did he say?”

  “The world is run by women. Paul Erdős was the greatest mind of the twentieth century after Feynman.”

  Corey said he had an errand to run. He left the house and walked around the neighborhood, thinking. He returned when dusk was falling and told Leonard he wanted to talk about ALS.

  His father had made himself dinner while he was gone and had already finished eating.

  “You realize, nothing will stop her from dying.”

  “I know that.”

  “That’s what terminally ill means.”

  “But we can still help her, can’t we? You care about my mother, don’t you?”

  “Of course I care about your mother. I go a long way back with her. A lot longer than you do. Before you were born.”

  “I was worried for a minute.”

  “It’s a difficult situation,” Leonard said.

  Corey bowed his head.

  “It’s very sad for me,” Leonard sighed. “I remember when she was still in college, when she was really still a girl. I took her around Boston for the first time, the real city—not Cambridge. We went to Santarpio’s. I remember how it opened up her eyes. Her eyes blew up—Italian pizza! Learning about different cultures, getting her outside the narrow framework she was in. I had never been with someone who was so fundamentally narrow before. She was from the sticks. I remember it forced me to take stock. I made the decision to get involved. I mentored her. She was so proud of her education, I remember, and she was actually getting a very bad education at the time, a terrible education, and I had to be the one to tell her: Challenge authority! Question everything! Don’t buy what they’re selling you! And most of all, grow, grow, grow! I watched her grow a huge amount as a person. I put myself on the line to make that happen. I had to be the one to tell her to quit school. How do you think that went down? Sometimes the student turns on the teacher. I took the heat for that.”

  “Well, I just want to help her now.”

  “I know that no son wants to hear about what his mother did before he was born. It makes you uncomfortable. But I’m telling you this for a reason, Corey. There’s always a reason. It’s because I think you’re old enough to hear. Do you understand?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I became very good at surviving. There are lots of things I’ve learned. Things most men don’t know. Things I could teach you.”

  “Like what?”

  “My experience has been very wide.”

  Corey asked Leonard to tell him what he meant. Leonard said he’d have to wait. Be patient. He’d tell him when he was ready, a little at a time.

  As they were talking, Corey had been getting cold. When he went to the kitchen where Leonard had been cooking, he found the reason why: The window was open as wide as it would go like a gaping hollering mouth. Pots and pans lay everywhere and the room stank. The trash barrel was full. The sour greasy rankness of the smell distressed him psychologically for reasons he could not explain. It didn’t feel like their kitchen anymore. Leonard’s cooking—brown sauce full of chunky stuff in Tupperware containers—had taken over an entire shelf in the refrigerator. Gloria’s food was stuffed on other shelves. An empty can of tomato paste sat on the floor, the razor-sharp lid open like a talking trash can.

  When he went to close the window, the screen was nowhere to be found. It was lying on the ground outside. He leaned out and picked it up and fit it in the sash.

  He started putting the pots and pans in the sink. One was an expensive Teflon skillet that was unfamiliar. There was grease on his mother’s protein. The paper towels had been used down to the cardboard tube. Tiny orange grease spores and black cindery dust were spattered in a ring around the stovetop burner, a white hole in the center, corresponding to the skillet, like the hole in the center of a solar eclipse. He took his shirt off and used it as a rag.

  The room began to warm, but it was getting darker. He snapped on the light and took the trash out. There was another bag of garbage leaking on the kitchen floor. He ran the bags out to the curb—they were heavy to the point of ripping—and ran back in, barefoot, bare-chested and freezing.

  He felt the need to explain himself to Leonard. He said he wanted to get the house in order for his mother: “I know I’m weird.”

  When she got back that night, Corey told her in Leonard’s hearing he’d been cleaning up a mess his father had made.

  * * *

  —

  The next day when he came home from school and didn’t see Leonard on the couch, he went to the kitchen to look for him, and he was there. Corey broke into a grin and said, “What are we going to talk about today?”

  “How about nothing?” Leonard said.

  “Are you mad?”

  The man was cutting piles of garlic with a kitchen knife, which appeared to come from the same designer cooki
ng-ware collection as the Teflon skillet. The skillet was green-tea green; the knife’s blade and handle were enameled dandelion yellow and modeled on a samurai sword. Leonard had chopped so much garlic with it the tiny slivers formed a mountain you could have scooped up and molded into a baseball. He wore a gauntlet of sticky white garlic slivers as if he’d dipped his knuckles in glue and then in broken lightbulb shards. Skins lay drifted on the kitchen floor. He broke another head of garlic into cloves. The skins stuck to his fingers like sheets of dandruff. He picked up the knife and continued cutting.

  “Corey, let me give you a word of advice.”

  “Sure.”

  “You can bullshit anybody you want, but you can’t bullshit me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Leonard told him to get lost. Out of nowhere, Corey lost control of himself and started crying in the kitchen doorway. Wiping his face, he began making a full confession. “I narked on you to my mother about the mess. I still want to earn your trust.”

  Leonard was willing to forgive and forget. “You had a labial moment.”

  “A what?”

  “A labial moment.”

  “Oh, like labia?”

  And so Leonard was willing to talk to him again.

  “Look, Corey, you have to understand: I grew up different from you. It was a very different time. We had rumbles. I doubt you know what a rumble is. It’s a gang fight where you hit someone with a garbage can lid or a bike chain. Society has changed. If you did half the stuff I did back then, they’d lock you up and throw away the key. You can do anything now of a peaceful nature. You want to do a protest march, they’ll let you. We had the Vietnam War back then, and you did not oppose the Vietnam War—but I did. I got called every name in the book: pinko, commie. I had these kids in my school who were dead set on fighting me. Their dads were construction workers. My dad was a bum unfortunately. So I said we could fight, but we had to go to this place I knew. We had these marshes, these flats where I dug for clams. I knew exactly how far away it was; it was two miles exactly from where we were. I thought they’d say forget it and the fight would be off. But they were willing to walk the whole two miles for the chance to beat up a communist.”