by Craig Nova
He was an assistant district commissioner, and an opening came up for the commissioner’s job. One of the advantages of the commissioner’s job was that my father would get a car and a cell phone, and he would have a secretary, too. So, after he put in for the job we played a game in which he sat on the back steps of our house and pretended that he was driving the commissioner’s car, and I would be a state trooper who had stopped him for speeding. He told me who he was, and I’d say, “Well, excuse me, Mr. Commissioner. I will know better in the future and will remember the car. Have a good day.” This was about three years before Sara was arrested, and so I must have been fourteen, but even then I thought this was the kind of thing an eight-year-old would have done. But we were tense, and when you are tense you often don’t know what to do and so you act stupid.
In the evening, my mother would say to him, “Any word?”
“No,” he said. “Not yet. I’ve heard, though, that they have stopped interviewing.”
“That’s a good sign,” said my mother.
“Yes. I think so,” he said. “It’s possible.”
Then he told me a story about a fish that someone had caught, one that was ugly and deformed and probably caused by a pesticide that the potato farmers were using on Japanese beetles. Or by the nuclear power plant that was upstream on the river. He brought a fish like this home once, a creature that had a hump on its side and iridescent scales the color of a housefly. One eye was clouded over, just like it had been cooked. I took the thing out to the garage and looked at its skin with a magnifying glass, and in its mouth, too. Scales like a rainbow. Big ridges in its mouth.
My father sat on the back steps when I came home from school. I used to come in quietly sometimes, and this time I wish I hadn’t. He was on the back steps, looking at the empty field, the place where those sheep had been when everything had seemed so filled with hope and possibility. When he saw me, he turned away. His expression was one I had seen before, as though someone had slipped that viper into his chest and it was moving around, although I saw now what it cost him to pretend it wasn’t there.
“Who did they give it to?” I said.
“Frank Ketchum,” he said.
“That asshole?” I said. “What does he know about brook trout?”
“He has a degree in business from Stanford,” said my father.
He made a sound, not a sigh exactly, but more like the first breath of surprise perfectly imbued with a long-held suspicion.
“Frank Ketchum is an asshole,” I said.
“I don’t know, Jake,” he said. “You get to a certain point in life and you realize things are going to stop. You hit a wall. Nothing new will happen.”
He was afraid to touch me for fear I would pull away. But I wasn’t old enough to do anything aside from going on about Frank Ketchum, which, of course, didn’t help. The worst thing, I suppose, was that I was a little ashamed, because things were supposed to advance in a certain way and the fact that he didn’t get the job just showed that we weren’t advancing as everybody else was, and that meant there was something wrong with us, didn’t it? Well, everyone knows how brutal things can be. Either you’re in or you’re out, and if you’re out, God save you.
The odd thing is that Frank Ketchum died of a heart attack a couple of years later when he was at a convention of state commissioners. This was just after Sara had been arrested. Ketchum died in a room with a nineteen-year-old hooker, who at first just thought, as the police said, that Ketchum was very satisfied, and she was waiting around for a tip. When my father heard of Ketchum’s heart attack he said something that made me certain I would never be ashamed of him.
He said: “That’s a shame.” He said it as sincerely and as definitely as anything I have ever heard. When I heard his voice, I immediately thought of that region of space where galaxies collided in a gilt-colored mist. But that’s what he taught me and one of the things that is disparaged these days. A standard of behavior, of feeling, of knowing that when you feel a nasty thing, or screw someone over to get ahead, it isn’t that you are getting somewhere, but are being reduced, made into less of a human being. The notion of dignity, these days, is a hard one; it’s this tension that makes it hard to be a decent man. Of course, it is difficult to have beliefs that are hard to live up to, but sucking it up and going about your business aren’t looked upon as anything but the kind of thing a foolish man does.
This time, when the commissioner’s job came available, my father didn’t apply for it, but they offered it to him anyway, and he took it, not with the same joy as he would have had the first time, but with the air of a man trying on an expensive secondhand suit.
We used to go fishing from time to time at a place called Furnace Creek, and what my father said when he heard about the job was, “Jake, you know what? Furnace Creek is going to be in my territory. What do you think of them apples?”
My mother brought home a bottle of champagne, already chilled. My father opened it. They sat at the kitchen table, and my father said, “I guess we can get the house painted.”
“Yes,” said my mother. “It’s funny how things work out.”
My father had a glass of the champagne, the little bubbles in it looking polished.
“Do you think the police told Ketchum’s wife about the prostitute?” my mother said.
“Yes,” I said, “I bet they did.”
My father looked at me. He sat down at the table.
“Hmpf,” he said. “Well. I guess they did.”
“They wouldn’t let a chance like that slip by,” I said.
“No, of course not,” said my father. “Understanding comes at a price, huh, Jake?”
“What price?” said my mother. “What are we talking about?”
“The price is knowing the cops would blab,” my father said to me. “Isn’t that right? You know that cruelty has an instinct to show itself. Goddamn it.”
“Oh, come on,” said my mother. “Drink up. Is this a celebration or not?”
“Yes,” said my father. “Of course it is. Of course. Here, Jake, have a glass of champagne.” He closed his eyes when he had a sip. “And, of course, we have something else to celebrate. You got into Berkeley. That’s something. It makes me happy and proud,” he said. “What are you going to study?”
New books came into the library, and one of them must have weighed fifteen pounds. Page after page of equations, of graphs, of summations. A short history of calculus, lives of Newton, Planck, Einstein. Then a section on integral equations.
New photos from the Hubble Telescope were at the back of the book. One was of a part of the universe where two galaxies collided, the clouds of stars making a glow, bright as gold and more mysterious, the births of stars giving the center of the photograph an elusive gilt coloring. And drifting away from it there was a cloud, dark, misty, filled with an obvious . . . fertility, or something that comes even before fertility: the possibility of new worlds.
I still wonder what those women would have done to me and whether or not I would have gone. I guess maybe that was the test that Sara was setting up, and why she said in her letter to me from the Center for Troubled Girls that her job was going to be to haunt me. For the rest of my life.
Of course, she came back when I least expected it.
PART TWO
I STUDIED ASTRONOMY AT the University of California at Berkeley, and my Ph.D. committee was made up of Nobel Prize winners.
Of course, I had to write a thesis, and my specialty was a combination of subatomic physics and cosmology, and in particular I was interested and still am for that matter in distortion of gravity in the observable universe. These distortions explained, as far as I was concerned, why objects that should never have been close to one another gathered in clusters, and in defiance of all statistical analysis. My ideas about this had to do with string theory and the existence of the Higgs Boson, still not discovered, but nevertheless a possibility. And, I thought, in the end it would help me understand the Con
stant and to be able to assign a value to it.
Anyway, when I was writing, I did some scientific jobs. For instance, one of them was to help design an object that would last ten thousand years and would still be, at the end of that time, a warning. This was a marker for a nuclear waste dump. I worked on it with another student, a woman who dyed her hair green, to match her eyes, and wore clothes from the twenties, such as flapper outfits with spangles, that she got from used-clothes stores, and who insisted that she be called M. Cheryl Bogs. Sort of retro-sultry. So we called her Em. She was a cultural anthropologist, and I kept trying to come up with a cultural item we could use for the marker, something that all people would understand. She told me we couldn’t use language, since the half-life of a language is only five hundred years. And so I suggested snake markings, like those on the most poisonous vipers, but she told me that wouldn’t work either. No cultural absolutes. For instance, she told me that in a part of Africa, the most socially elite funeral had the dead body buried in a coffin that looked like an enormous green lobster. She used to say, “With a world like that, what’s universal?”
We became friends over a tattoo, or the time when she was considering getting a tattoo. She had been studying a tribe in New Zealand, and she thought it would be “cool” to get a tattoo on her face that said she was related to the stars.
“We are all made out of stars,” I said. “Or the stars make everything we are made out of. All the elements. Everything comes from the stars. It’s a miracle we don’t glow.”
“Ha, ha,” she said.
“So, if you know that, you don’t need the tattoo,” I said.
“Hmmmm,” she said. “Give me another reason. I’m only half convinced.”
“Life forces so many final decisions on you,” I said. “I think you want to keep them down to a minimum.”
So Em didn’t get a tattoo. The marker for the nuclear waste dump was like something from the National Park Service. Granite, about eight feet tall, with the message cut into an overhang with a laser (the overhang protected the message from the weather). The message showed, in a cartoon just like the stick figures a kid makes, someone digging and then getting sick. The dating for the marker was done with how the constellations look now. In ten thousand years they’ll look different.
Every now and then, when Em and I saw one another, she’d say, “Hey, Starman, thanks for the tip on the tattoo.”
So I finished writing the theory of distortions in gravity, neatly tied, I thought, to string theory. But, as I said, I had to defend it before my committee, a bunch of Nobel Prize winners. And not just from astronomy, but physics, chemistry, math.
None of them made me feel as though their examination of me would be pro forma, but one man left me particularly uneasy. This was Neils Dieckmann, who, of course, had won the Nobel Prize in Physics. In the weeks before I had to defend my thesis, I found myself waking at three in the morning and thinking about Neils Dieckmann. At dawn, I sat up, put my feet on the floor, and turned toward the gray light of sunrise.
Dieckmann stroked his little goatee when he thought he had someone trapped. A story went around about a Japanese graduate student who, in the midst of defending his thesis, had been asked a particularly difficult question by Dieckmann, and that afterward the student had gone up to the Campanile and jumped off. The next day some fraternity boys painted a bull’s-eye on the ground where he had landed. The red concentric circles, I supposed, were waiting for me if I let things get too far out of control, or if I couldn’t answer the critical question. Or so it seemed in that moment of anxiety.
The woman I was living with, Gloria Truslow, was from California and really did come from the San Fernando Valley, and she stirred uneasily at dawn, her blond hair cut short but still golden in the light that came in the window. She was a medical student, and maybe I’d be able to find a job here, to stay in Berkeley, while she went to school. That is, if I could get by the exam.
“Take it easy,” she said. “You think he’s that smart, that guy? What’s his name?”
“Dieckmann,” I said.
“Just listen to your voice,” she said. “You’re terrified. And you’re sweating, too.”
“You want to know how he got the Nobel Prize?” I said.
“It better be good,” said Gloria.
Dieckmann’s specialty, or one of them, was to look at evidence that was supposed to support one theory and then he showed that it really revealed something else. This is how he made the case for dark matter, and suggested that it might be what made Einstein uneasy and why the universe is accelerating. He did this on the basis of some mundane photos of the sun, but of course he was only interested in the slightest distortion in the background. It was like seeing a bottle cap at the side of the road and demonstrating at what speed it had hit the ground, where it had been manufactured, and the make of the car from which it had been thrown. Dieckmann had been a graduate student at Oxford, and Richard Feynman had come for a visit, and when Dieckmann came into the restaurant where Feynman was having dinner, Feynman stood up, bowed at the waist, then said, “Is est unus nos exspecto pro.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It’s Latin. ‘This is the one we waited for.’”
Gloria’s eyes got big in that slash of sunlight that lay across the bed.
“Feynman said that?” she said. “Even I know about Feynman.”
“That’s only part of it. There’s more,” I said. Dieckmann’s work had predicted the existence of previously unknown subatomic particles, but the interesting thing was the way he went about this, inferences from some previously discarded observations, which were thought to be erroneous. His mind worked like a TV screen in an airport: a talking head, which was a main idea, but underneath he had the constant running of three or four tickers, all of which he could read at the same time. And understand. He had come up, just for fun, with a way to beat the odds at twenty-one in the casinos in Las Vegas. One of the probes to the outer reaches of the solar system went haywire, but the NASA executives didn’t talk to their engineers. They called Dieckmann, who worked out the equations on a cereal box his kids had left on the kitchen table. It took about five minutes. The engineers had been working on it for weeks. He told a biological researcher the best way to sequence DNA.
“Holy god,” she said. “I had heard it had been some physicist.”
So, on the morning when they were going to grill me, the sun fell with an ominous yellow, even by California standards, as I sat on the steps of the building where the examination was going to take place. Frankly, I would have preferred the fog. The sunshine made everything too clear. I put my head in my hands and closed my eyes and imagined what a Higgs Boson would look like. Would that help? Mass, speed, if discovered in a linear accelerator.
“Hey, Starman,” said Em. “What’s cooking? You look like you ate a funny oyster or something. Have you ever eaten that sushi that comes from a poisonous fish, and if it isn’t prepared right, you die?”
“No.”
“Funny,” Em said. “You look like you just had a piece that wasn’t prepared right.”
I nodded to the building behind me.
“Uh-oh,” she said. “You have to defend a thesis? Yours?”
“It’s a good day to die,” I said.
“Jesus, Jake, with an attitude like that you are going to get a first-class, top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art fucking.”
That sunshine fell around us. Down below, in Sproul Plaza, the undergraduates walked around like an experiment of random distribution.
“Here,” said Em. “Among the Adimi, a tribe in South America, before an initiation ritual the young men do this. It calms them down.”
She put her hands behind her head and touched the thumbs and fingers of one hand to the other. Then she breathed deeply. Closed her eyes.
“Try it,” she said. “Nothing like it. A sort of quick massage.”
It actually felt pretty good.
I went into the roo
m where the members of the committee sat, dowdy and with bits of toilet paper stuck to the places where they had nicked themselves when they had shaved in a hurry. Rolls of Tums on the table. Calculations on the back of a receipt from a gas pump. Little tufts of beard here and there and hair sticking out of their ears, except, of course, Dieckmann, who dressed with the air of the European he was and who had trimmed his goatee for the occasion. He sat there, with that eye patch over his blind eye, stroking his little beard. His stare was constant as he weighed each small bit of information as regards to its objective truth and how it could produce infinite vulnerability for the person who was mistaken about what it meant.
Each one asked a question in turn, and as they went, it became clear to me that I knew more than anyone in the room about the relation between undiscovered but probable particles and distortion of gravity. They asked questions, and I answered, my voice seeming more clear and certain as the time went along. That is, until we got to Dieckmann.
“Well,” he said. “I have a little something I’d like to ask.”
He stroked his beard.
One of the mathematicians, Jerry Stern, started to giggle.
George Praccio, a chemist, said, “Neils, you aren’t going to do it again, are you?”