by BRIAN HALL
That was the moment he— What would be the right phrase? “Fell in love with her” is ridiculous. It was the moment after which he found himself thinking about her much of the time. He no longer had to wonder where the warning bells were. He was fixated on one of his students! How pathetic!
Ah, maybe “fixated on her” is the right phrase.
For the rest of the semester he forced himself to address both sides of the lecture hall, and yes, he always noted when she arrived and where she sat, and when she chewed on her pen, and when she stopped taking notes. (Was he nattering on?) He hoped she wouldn’t ask him any more questions and he also hoped she would. (She didn’t.) He had two more dreams involving her, neither of them erotic, but unusually vivid. In one of them he and she were in a hot-air balloon under a lurid sky, and he wanted to descend while she wanted to rise. In the other he was stretching a carpet while she was sitting on it, but for some reason that was helping rather than hindering him. He woke up from both dreams with an erection but, to repeat, all REM sleep induces erections.
He read her final exam, and was again impressed by her intelligence. More than that, she displayed an imaginative engagement with the material that suggested she might make a good astronomer. He worried that she would take the companion course in the spring, then was disappointed when she didn’t. He went so far as to inquire with the registrar and was informed she had taken a leave of absence. He wondered what that implied, but restrained himself from looking further. He did not want to make a complete fool of himself.
Sometime in March he found a note from her in his faculty mailbox.
Hi Prof Fuller,
I don’t know if you remember me, I was in your intro course last semester, I’m the one who paraded my soupçon of knowledge about Tycho Brahe in front of the class at your first lecture. I’m taking a break this semester and frankly contemplating not coming back, I liked a couple of my courses but I’m not sure I can bear to jump through all those hoops just for that piece of paper, most of my life I’ve been mostly self-educated and I also have issues with authority figures that probably don’t serve me well, but there you go. Anyway, I wanted to say that your course was my favorite, and I also liked the way you taught it, you seemed unpompous and kind for a professor, though I’m probably breaking protocol here. But now that I’ve broken it, I’m wondering if you’d ever like to get together for coffee or tea, I don’t know anyone else who’s interested in astronomy the way I’ve been for as long as I can remember. You can see from my address that I live in the area, and I can come into town most days. Let me know. Or not!
Saskia (White)
Two or three weeks went by during which he pretended to have qualms. Then he called the number she’d written below her name. They met at a coffee shop and talked for three hours. Some of the thoughts he remembers going through his head on that bright cold April afternoon in the booth by the streaky picture window:
Her mind worked much faster than his.
It reminded him of Susan.
She wasn’t his student now.
She was twenty-two.
Twenty-two is way more than half of thirty-four.
When they parted outside she said, “That was a lot of fun.”
He said, “For me, too.”
She said, “You’re sweet.”
He stood like an ox, saying nothing.
She turned abruptly. “Call me again.” This was over her shoulder, as she walked away. “Or not!”
He watched her recede down the long sidewalk, moving faster than everybody else, including people with longer legs, which was everybody else.
2006
Back in the sixties, when Mark was a boy, his family rarely ate out. However, occasionally they would go to the Pacific Hut at the Burlington Mall. Compared to the brightly lit concourse, the restaurant was murky. Photographs of thatched huts were framed in bamboo stalks the size of bass flutes, and similarly large bamboo halves covered the panels dividing the booths. His sister would sing under her breath, “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip . . .”
Whenever his family went anywhere, they always did exactly what they did the last time they were there. At the Pacific Hut, he and Susan would share a Pu Pu Platter. His mother would get the Tahitian lobster and say that it wasn’t as good as the lobster at the Willow Pond Kitchen, but it wasn’t bad. His father would order the Sweet and Sour Chicken, and Mark would be struck anew by the velvety DayGlo-orange sauce draped over the golden puffs of batter.
That was his entire childhood experience with the kind of food his family referred to as Chinese, though he later supposed it was Americo-Sino-Hawaiian. It wasn’t until freshman year of college that he was taken by worldly classmates to a Cantonese restaurant in Boston’s Chinatown, where he looked on agog as they wielded chopsticks with the skill of his father wrangling a slide rule. According to some prior agreement he wasn’t party to, they shared all the dishes, and the platters quickly emptied to the sound of clacking pincers while he chased a slippery snow pea pod around his plate. He pocketed a pair of the disposable chopsticks and over the next few days practiced in the freshman dining hall until he was adept at picking up single grains of rice.
He sometimes remembered this when he was busy in his university office in the evening and decided to order takeout. The Wok Inn was a mile from campus, tucked away in a small plaza oddly removed from foot and vehicular traffic, down an access road that curved behind a hotel. At night it was badly lit and forlorn. When he entered the Wok Inn to pick up his order, no one was ever sitting at any of the tables. A woman would come out from the kitchen and hand him his food and ring up the amount. After stepping out, he would sometimes stand for a minute under the flat concrete awning that ran part of the way around the square. The plaza was so isolated, you couldn’t hear the traffic along the road on the far side of the hotel. With a step forward he could look up and see Vega or Sirius or Rigel, depending on the season, and those stars seemed less isolated than this parking lot. No one else ever arrived while he stood there. Yet the bag of food was warm in his hand. If he looked back at the Wok Inn, the lights were on, but no one was visible, not even the woman who’d served him.
It led to fanciful thoughts. It felt as though the Wok Inn had sprung into existence a moment before he’d arrived, and would disappear as soon as he left. Or maybe what gave him such a happy thrill was the opposite notion: that the Wok Inn existed without any need for him, or apparently for anyone else; that it was always there, whether anyone visited it or not, like prokaryotic life on exoplanets, which probably existed in some form, but which humans might never discover. Like virtually everything in the universe, for that matter, galaxies and radiation and cubic kiloparsecs of expanding space, the whole shebang—out there for certain, but just as certainly not there for us.
One night after he’d returned to his office with his order, he sat in front of his computer and contemplated for the umpteenth time that nameless feeling—the mystery of ordinary moments that seemed “pregnant with meaning,” as some people liked to say. This was poetry’s domain, as he understood it. He had never much cared for poetry. Most of it seemed unnecessarily obscure. Yet life did offer up moments of intensity, whose precise meaning was ambiguous. He wondered if it might be possible to convey the phenomenon in words, but without using all that annoying poetic language. Since the feeling was engendered by simple real-world facts, why not simply list those facts? Mightn’t such a list engender in the reader the same or a similar feeling?
He opened a new document on his computer and wrote down the sort of list he had in mind. He read it over, discarded it, tried again, read again, rewrote, and eventually had something that roused in him a feeling not dissimilar to the one he often had outside the Wok Inn. Of course a better test would be to find out if it had such an effect on a reader who hadn’t experienced the antecedent moment. However, he felt ab
ashed at the thought of letting anyone else see it. Probably it would mean nothing to them. Probably it would seem simple-minded.
He decided to send the list to his daughter, who was eleven years old and precocious. She didn’t live with him, so he and she mainly communicated by email.
11:49 p.m., April 30, 2006
Dear Mette,
I hope you are well, and that you’re still having fun with algebra. Please say hello to your mother for me. Here’s an amusing proof that all numbers are equal:
Let x and y be any real numbers.
Let z = (x + y)/2
Multiply both sides of the above equation by 2, to get: 2z = x + y
Now multiply both sides by (x−y): 2z(x−y) = (x + y)(x−y), or 2zx−2zy = x2−y2.
Rearrange: y2−2zy = x2−2zx.
Add z2 to both sides: y2–2zy + z2 = x2–2zx + z2.
Factor both sides: (y−z)2 = (x−z)2
Take the square root of both sides: y−z = x−z
Add z to both sides, and voilà: y = x!
Can you figure out where I cheated?
Also, I wrote a “poem.” Or something, anyway. I’m not sure what to call it. It reminds me a little bit of a data set, except here each datum is a descriptive sentence. Anyway, here it is:
Walk In, Take Out
The parking lot is at the end of an access road that curves behind the hotel.
You would never find it if you didn’t already know it was there.
At night the lot is always dark and empty.
There are six other shops that appear to still be in business, but they’re always dark.
The Wok Inn has a dining area that is narrow and deep.
There are eight tables and twenty-eight chairs.
The fluorescent lights in the drop ceiling are always on.
The plastic red lanterns on the tables are never lit.
The room is always empty.
No one is ever at the cash register.
In front of the cash register is a bowl of after-dinner mints.
When I call to order take-out, the phone is always answered promptly.
When I park in the dark lot and come into the empty room, I always call out, “Hello?”
A woman always comes immediately out of the kitchen at the back with my order.
She never asks for the name on the order.
The order is always correct.
She rings me up at the cash register.
She always offers me a mint.
I sometimes glimpse a child at the back of the kitchen in the back of the room.
I’m never sure if it’s the same child or the same woman.
love,
Your Father
2006
Secrets of her solitary life:
Her age is the smallest nontrivial palindromic number. Her nest is behind her computer, between two bookcases, against the window. She crawls into it through a foot-wide gap. Wishner waits on the windowsill. Her school is P.S. 17Q. Q stands for Queens, 17 is a prime number, and Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet. The windowsill is 14 inches above her mattress. Her apartment is on the third floor, which is also the top floor. When she lies in her nest no one but birds and stars can see her. She reads Wishner by daylight filtered through grimy glass. At night she contorts the gooseneck of her desk lamp, casting a cone on her pillow.
On the book cover, Pickwick sits on the flat end of an upturned log, his striped back toward the viewer, his bright-eyed face in profile. Sunflower seed casings are scattered around his rump and tail. Wishner’s caption: “The nobility of character and elegance of independence: Pickwick looks at the world over his shoulder.”
Her mother sleeps on a futon in the other room. That’s also where she and her mother eat. The open floor space in the kitchen is only eighteen square feet.
Her address is 30-51 33rd Street. The buildings on her block are connected in a right-angle back-and-forth pattern like what you sometimes see on Greek friezes, or like cogs on a wheel, if you were to cut the wheel and straighten it out. The buildings are red brick on the first floor, beige brick on the upper two floors. On some signs and maps the street numbers don’t have dashes (3051) and on other signs and maps they do (30-51). She did research and discovered the dash is the older form. The first two digits indicate the lower of the two avenues flanking the street in question. The historic use of the dash is disappearing. She is fighting this.
There is an endearing photograph of Gutrune on page 47. She is standing on the same upturned log with her hands to her mouth and her cheeks stuffed with sunflower seeds. Wishner’s caption informs us she is twenty-seven days pregnant.
She and her mother have been living in New York City for four years. Her mother wants to find an apartment that’s either bigger or cheaper or both. She dreads this. She has made her nest perfect. Why do people have to move so much?
To get to school, she walks northeast on 33rd Street and turns left at 30th Avenue. At 31st Street she walks under the N and R, an elevated railway fallaciously called a subway. At 30th Street she crosses 30th Avenue via a crosswalk that’s diagonal because 30th Street makes a jog right there.
At P.S. 17Q other children insist on speaking to her. Their motives are unfathomable.
Here is how young chipmunks mature. When they are one day old and weigh five grams, they squeal. When they are five to seven days old and weigh ten grams, their lower teeth, stripes, and hair begin to show. When they are ten days old and weigh fifteen grams, they move about. When they are thirty days old and weigh thirty grams, their eyes open, and they are weaned. When they are forty days old and weigh sixty grams, they emerge from their burrow. When they are sixty days old and weigh eighty grams, they are fully grown. When they are one hundred days old, the females are sexually mature. Repeat cycle.
In the autumn of 1974, Lawrence Wishner installed lights over a woodpile on his back porch. The porch stood thirty feet from the woods. He mounted a camera inside one of his house windows that looked out on the porch. In front of the woodpile he stood two logs on end at precalculated exposure distances from the lights.
She glimpsed a chipmunk for half a second in Astoria Park before it put its tail straight up like the antenna of the transistor radio she’s been taking apart in her room and zipped under a bush.
She and her mother used to live with her grandmother in a house next to the lake north of Ithaca. Then her grandmother got cancer and died. They moved to New York City because her mother wanted to find more acting jobs. She didn’t want to make that move, either.
On the back flap, there’s a photograph of Wishner. He has dark hair falling across his forehead and squarish glasses with dark frames. He has dark lines under his eyes, maybe from rising early every day for six years. He’s sitting at a picnic table and behind him stretches worn and weedy ground that presumably is his backyard. He’s wearing a plaid workshirt. Around his neck he has a black strap attached to a camera with a telephoto lens. A fine caption for this photo would be, “The nobility of character and elegance of independence: Lawrence Wishner looks at the world.”
She emails back and forth with her father. He sends her mathematical puzzles and word games. Her last message to him was a cryptogram of the Epimenides paradox: Iyhcimhoip bri Agibem peho, “Euu Agibemp egi uhegp.”
P.S. 17Q is also called the Henry David Thoreau school. She found a Riverside Edition of Walden in the natural history section of the Strand bookstore and read it in two days. On days after school when it isn’t raining she looks for squirrels in the trees of Athens Square, which is next to P.S. 17Q. She never sees a chipmunk, nor expects to, since Athens Square is small and chipmunks are shy. Athens Square has a sunken plaza and a peristyle of three Doric columns with an entablature. Entablatures traditionally consist of an architrave, a frieze, and a cornice, but th
e entablature of Athens Square is lacking a frieze. The entablature is broken to make the peristyle look like a ruin. There is a bronze statue of Athena and a bronze statue of Socrates. Socrates is sitting on a smooth piece of granite that slopes downward so he looks like he’s going down a slide. As far as she can tell, no one in the square ever pays attention to any of this.
Wishner is not a wildlife biologist, but a biochemist. He used to teach at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He specializes in the metabolism of Vitamin E and antioxidants. He is an accomplished photographer. One day he saw two chipmunks playing in his woodpile. He spent the next six years observing and photographing them every day. He learned to individually recognize fifty-nine resident chipmunks and forty-nine transients. He made maps of burrow entrances and charts of family relationships over several generations. He noted the start and end of every individual’s hibernation period. His book is respected by experts.
Thoreau called chipmunks “striped squirrels,” and although he wrote several times in Walden about seeing regular squirrels, he mentioned a striped squirrel only once, and that wasn’t about seeing one, only hearing it, which tells you how shy they are.
People like to go down slides. Socrates was a person. Ergo—
On the back cover is Wishner’s photograph of Lady Cheltenham. She is down in the grass, at the edge of protective vegetation, perched on a piece of quartzite slightly larger than herself. She is looking straight into the camera. One front paw is raised. Wishner’s caption is, “Lady Cheltenham alone.”