by BRIAN HALL
“Can we watch Miracle of the White Stallions?”
“Sure thing.”
“But we need to get cigarettes. Aren’t we out of cigarettes?” Mark and the daytime aides he employed hid the cigarettes every evening and told his mother she had run out, so she wouldn’t get up during the night and burn the house down.
“Let me check. Gee, it turns out we do have some.”
“Oh, good. Can I have a cigarette?”
Mark watched Miracle of the White Stallions and National Velvet each approximately 120 times. He was fascinated to notice that, each time he saw them, they seemed more perfectly executed—perfectly acted, perfectly written, perfectly edited—and consequently their emotive power grew and grew. When the good Nazi General Tellheim lit his cigarette and said, “After such a terrible winter, I think we’re going to have quite a nice spring,” and walked off into the dark to his suicide, it felt like the most profound expression ever voiced by man of nature’s dreadful and wonderful indifference to human suffering and death.
Mark handed his mother her cigarettes. He brought from the kitchen her bottle of Ensure and a packet of animal crackers, the only things she would consume. He listened about 200 times to a tape recording of a voice recital he’d done with Susan during a brief period, fifteen to sixteen, when she was taking singing lessons. His father had made three backup copies, easy to find within his enormous music collection by consulting his handwritten card catalog, and each copy in succession warbled more as it deteriorated. Every time they listened, his mother would cry. “What a beautiful voice! Who’s playing piano?”
“That’s me.”
“Is Susan still singing?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“There’s an ecumenical church. It has a big choir. She solos sometimes. She really enjoys it.”
“That’s you playing piano.”
“Right.”
“Is that a mistake there?”
“Not right there.”
Mark goes up the stairs. The floor refinishers filled the holes left behind when the chairlift was taken out. Dad rode the lift in his last years, a big man ascending slowly, whirring, his face the impassive mask of Parkinsonism. He had once scoured the newspapers of the English-speaking world to find the hardest crossword puzzles, the ones with clues built around puns and anagrams. He and an equally avid co-worker eventually determined that the ones in The Guardian were the most diabolical. The co-worker would go to a university library once a month and photocopy back issues, then he and Dad would race to see who could complete them first.
More than degrading memory, Lewy body dementia disrupts the ability to organize information. (His father explained this to Mark, as it was happening.) The dozen pieces of observed data in any moment are slippery uniform balls. The need to tie your shoelace and the need to escape a burning house have the same weight. Midway in the long decline, Mark watched his father struggle to write down (handwriting shrinks, freezes) a daily schedule for his meds: sixteen hours awake, pills spaced evenly throughout the day, four of this medication, three of that, two of that. Mark looked at the wavering lines of the chart his father had drawn, the microscopic names of the drugs, the empty spaces awaiting checkmarks, the pencil in hand returning again and again to the parameters noted above: sixteen hours, four of this, three of that. His father would become agitated, his memory good enough to know that this was not his brain, not anymore.
Susan’s old bedroom is at the top of the stairs. Mark doesn’t go in. The deaths of his parents he accepts, but he was only thirty-three when Susan was killed, and the moment he heard the news it seemed to him that he had entered an alternate universe, where everything was the same, from the disposition of galactic superclusters to the jiggle of air molecules in his lungs, except for this one detail. Susan was alive in uncountable other universes, including the correct one, the one he had been kicked out of. Those are the words that have always accompanied the feeling: he had been kicked out.
He has wondered ever since if it was this persistent, illogical conviction of unreality that allowed him—it was an alternative him, wasn’t it? a quasi-unreal him—to do something that he would like to believe the real him would not have done. But then again, if he hadn’t done it, he wouldn’t have a daughter. Who is dear to him, even if he rarely sees her.
An uncomfortable subject.
Mark heads down the hall, in search of more of that peaceful euphoria. Here is his own old bedroom, overlooking the backyard. Bright and bare, his sleeping bag on the floor. When Mark was nine or ten he picked up from some book the phrase “bathed in moonlight,” and when the moon was in the right position relative to either of his two bedroom windows—one facing southeast, the other southwest—to cast its light across his blanket, he would say to himself, “I’m bathed in moonlight,” and a little bit of that feeling would come. Immanence. Epiphany. The oceanic feeling. What epileptics are said to feel right before a grand mal seizure. What schizophrenics experience in its nightmare form.
He still prefers to call it “the nameless feeling.” He suspects everyone means something different when they refer to it. My own private nameless feeling. Which is ironic, since a common element of it is a sense of expansion and connection. My own private self-serving confusion of my ego with the cosmos.
All his adult life he’s experienced the feeling when he sees a certain style of line drawings in young adult books. N. C. Wyeth and his imitators. Say, a sketch of a farmhouse under a tree. There’s the shapely abundant crown, with the two small rogue branches that poke out toward the bottom to keep it from looking too perfect; the house with its roof shaded in parallel lines, smoke undulating up from the stone chimney. There are the tufts here and there in the foreground representing the meadow-like turf, the one small squarish boulder half sunk in soil, flanked by a tall grass stalk, the fence of stripped saplings. Most stirring of all, there’s the trodden path that starts at the bottom of the picture and curves over the brow of the hill, dipping out of sight, reappearing smaller and farther away on a distant hill, and beyond that hill the mountains, and behind the mountains, towering cumulus clouds, suggesting that out there, far distant there, beyond those cloud-ramparts lies Aslan’s country, the Land of Faerie, Amber, Alpha Centauri—in other words, Heaven—and that the pebbly, homely footpath is the way to get there.
He wondered why that style of drawing meant so much to him. Then he cleared out the family attic five months ago and came across an edition of The Yearling, with illustrations by N. C. Wyeth, and there they were: sapling fences, chimneys capped with sinuous smoke, paths curving off toward hills and clouds. And he remembered (he hadn’t thought about this for a long time) his ambitious, lively, slightly crazy seventh-grade English teacher, whom he came to adore, and her tag phrase to her students, these favored sons and daughters of professors and scientists, launched on a Titan rocket of public money in pursuit of Sputnik: “To whom much is given, much is expected.” And he remembered that dark rainy weekend, rather strangely dark, “penumbral,” when he’d lain in bed curled around The Yearling with his back to the door and had his conversion experience, the discovery of a more-real world beyond and behind this one. That idea could lead to dangerous falsehoods—e.g., Platonism, Christianity—but it was also, in a way, the root of science, particularly mathematics and physics. No accident that Plato was a mathematician; that Christianity was Neo-Platonism. An illusion powerful enough to break his heart. Dreaminess hardwired in the human brain. A necessary concomitant, perhaps, to creative intelligence.
He also found in the attic The World of Tomorrow. (He’s gone up there now, he’s staring at the patch of subflooring where the box used to be.) It must have been his father who packed it away, since his mother never saved anything. As an adult he could see, in the photographs of the City of Tomorrow, the obvious artificiality of the model: wayward grit looking like hazardous rocks on the superhighway
; dried-moss “trees” that he recognized from his days constructing model railroad towns. Yet the old ghostly yearning possessed him all the same, the longing to live in the ordered City. And at last he thought he could see why the skyscrapers’ featureless glowing windows had called to him so powerfully. It was precisely because he couldn’t see through them. Radiant behind one of them (where is Carol Merrill standing?) was his future life, so wonderful no photograph could depict it. His longing wasn’t for the future per se, but for his unimaginable adulthood. Maybe he would have a theremin, but that wasn’t the point, the point was that his unimaginable wife would play theremin sonatas with him. Sure, he’d have a Rocket Academy yearbook, but the part he would read over Martian brandy in the evenings would be the love notes his wife had written to him in the margins when they were cadets. And his hovercar out on the telepad was merely the outward sign of something far more wonderful: the unimaginable job, at which he was an acknowledged whiz, awaiting him at the rainbow-end of his ballistic commute.
Mark was forty-three years old before he realized he had never quite stopped believing that one day he would take a spaceliner to visit the lunar colony, or to Mars to advise on some thorny problem of terraforming. He had sealed the dream in a suspended-animation pod in the back of his mind. He remembers exactly where he was when the pod popped open and the dream proved to be as dead as the fourth astronaut in Planet of the Apes. He was in his office at the university, putting on his coat to go home on a wintry March afternoon. The lining of his coat had started to detach at several points simultaneously, and he was intrigued by the fact that the threads of the various seams had a roughly equivalent longevity regardless of the amount of friction or tension to which they were subjected (shoulder seams, for example, enduring more daily wear and stress than bottom-hem seams). This led him to ponder the inevitable degradation of cotton at the molecular level, from oxidation, dust mites, bacteria, etc. This led to a general thought-bromide about entropy, energy loss, the eventual end of the universe, and so on, and that in turn led to the daunting problem of fuel requirements, and therefore the necessity of additional mass, in spaceflight, an issue he was familiar with, lecturing on it annually in his Introduction to Astronomy course. But for some reason, this time—was it because the coat had belonged to his father, who was sixteen years into Parkinson’s, now wheelchair bound, laid out at night in his bed like a stone effigy?—this time, out popped genuine shock, a stab of loss. He stopped shrugging on the coat. He would die, never having left Earth.
Not just him. Sure, a few cocky test pilots and politically savvy scientists will probably set foot on Mars someday. But a colony? Given human shortsightedness and folly, he doubts it. And beyond? When he was a kid, not just science fiction writers but real scientists, in the main, confidently predicted that man would one day “reach the stars.” How, exactly? Faster-than-light travel is almost certainly impossible. And given the enormous time and energy required to reach even the nearest star at sublight speeds, plus the highly debatable benefit of doing so, Mark suspects that humanity will never leave the solar system.
He is gazing out the attic window, down at the eighty-year-old one-car detached garage that’s slowly falling apart. The new owners will have to figure out what to do about that. Zoning, bringing up to code, grandfathered footprint, blah blah. Good luck to them.
As for a visit or phone call from the neighbors—after forty years of SETI, we’ve heard nothing. Which, granted, also means little. We’ve monitored only a tiny fraction of the stars in our neighborhood, forty years is nothing on the cosmic timescale, and who says civilizations reliably produce radio emissions? The one civilization we know of, with the advent of fiber optics, may go radio silent in the next few decades. But Mark is one of those who finds Enrico Fermi’s question unsettling: Where is everybody? Fermi reasoned that, if intelligence were not vanishingly rare in the galaxy, then given the fact that planetary formation likely began eight to ten billion years ago, there would almost certainly have been civilizations that formed billions of years in the past. Some fraction of them, with thousands of years of technological development at their disposal, would surely have devoted energy to exploring the galaxy. Even we puny humans, with a mere two centuries of industrialization, can glimpse the technological feasibility of von Neumann probes that would multiply and spread from star system to star system. With nothing more than our present-day rocket technology for transport, such a scheme could fill the entire galaxy in less than 300 million years.
All right, then: Where are they?
Maybe intelligence is common, but equally common are catastrophic climate change, resource depletion, technological self-destruction. In 5,000 years, when serene bubble-boy imagined opening the time capsule of the 1965 New York World’s Fair and mulling over the contents in euphoric peace, it probably really will be all over, at least in Flushing Meadows, under a mile of ice, or 200 feet of water, or two inches of radioactive ash. Humans will still exist somewhere, but will they be theorizing about von Neumann probes or trapping rats for dinner?
Intelligence that’s out there, but of which we will never be aware, is scientifically equivalent to intelligence that’s not out there.
Mark comes down the attic stairs. He imagines a poster for a movie they’ll never make, showing a radio telescope and a dejected scientist, with the tag line, Turns Out We’re Alone After All.
He stops for a moment in the bedroom his parents shared while he was growing up. One could make an unpleasant joke. Move along, folks, nothing to see here.
He continues down. The only part of the house he hasn’t contemplated yet is the basement. Through the living room, off the kitchen, down again; rough wooden steps, exposed joists, bare lightbulbs. If the kitchen was Mom’s domain, this was Dad’s. In addition to his study, he had his workbench, his storage boxes, his tinkering notebooks. As soon as he went into the nursing home, Mom asked Mark if he could, at long last, clear out all Dad’s “crap down there.” It was so neatly stored, there was more than Mark realized. Boxes of rescued vacuum tubes, sash weights, pipe collars, doorknobs, lamp sockets, transistors, porch balusters, old-style fuses, circuit breakers, brakelight bulbs. There was a box filled with electric cords his father had cut from every house appliance he’d finally thrown away after Mom complained long enough about deteriorating performance. One box was marked “TV speakers,” and there they all were, from five generations of living room consoles and four of kitchen-table portables. Mark recognized the twin speakers from the 1959 black-and-white Motorola on which he had first watched Lost in Space. There were the ingenious, simple tools his father had made to help him in his tinkering. Artful stands to hold a tool or component at the right height and angle, so that he could accomplish a three-handed job. Hooks of various lengths and shapes set in homely carved wooden handles. Even the simplest things had a marvelous, seemingly effortless precision: pieces of boxboard cut to function as dividers in drawers of sized screws that perfectly slid in and out of their channels, that looked machine-made until you noticed the fragment of breakfast-cereal logo on one side.
Mark would throw stuff out, then drive in his father’s eighteen-year-old Toyota station wagon to visit him at the nursing home. He’d be sitting in his wheelchair in his double room, with his tray of half-eaten food, his juice or coffee mixed with a gellifier so that he wouldn’t aspirate it, looking with emptied wonder at the air in front of his frozen face. “Hey,” he’d say to Mark. Was he trying to smile? Mark would sit with him, utter comments on the fleeting images on the TV that was always on, pull the child’s crossword out from under the lunch tray. “How’s this one going, Dad? Let’s see, five across, man’s best friend, three letters, what do you think?”
His lower lip would work, his pale gray eyes hold fast on Mark’s face. “Damned if I know.” He’d try to laugh. “My mind is going; I don’t remember things the way I used to.”
When Mark got up to leave, his father’s face, in spite
of the Parkinsonian mask, would somehow express, it would positively radiate, a look of bleak abandonment. The last time Mark saw him conscious, there was something (he would swear in retrospect) especially horrified in that parting look, as though his father were seeing deeper than ever before into the abyss. Not seeming to see Mark, nor anything in the room, he said slowly and distinctly, like a blind oracle, “What a way to go.”
Mark drove back to the house, to clear out more of his crap. In the glove compartment of the old Toyota he found a notebook his father had started when he first bought the car, to check how the mileage claimed by the dealer compared to the actual mileage. Other people might do this, with one column recording odometer readings and another the number of gallons of gasoline consumed, but what made his father unusual was that once he’d started it, he couldn’t stop. The list went on for fifteen years. In the back of the notebook he’d created scatter plots with lines of best fit: fuel consumption by car’s age, mileage by year.
More than the rest of the house, the basement, now empty, looks different. The concrete walls and floor are shoddy and cold. Hard to imagine that a man lived most of his real life down here, perhaps found his only happiness down here. Mark slips through the narrow door into the windowless box where his father listened to his music, paid his bills, thought his thoughts. He was in high school before he finally noticed that it must have been originally designed as a fallout shelter. (His sister’s voice: Dumbass!) There is no ceiling light, so the room is almost pitch dark.
When Mark cleared out the desk in here he found, beneath road maps and instruction manuals going back forty years, every birthday and Father’s Day card his father had ever received from his children and his wife. He also found, folded, a sheet of paper with lines in his father’s handwriting from a poem by Robert Frost called “Revelation.”
We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,