by Craig Nova
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” said Dieckmann. He stroked his beard. “I just want to ask a little something. What harm can there be in that?”
Praccio reached out for the roll of Tums on the table and peeled away the silver paper, which he rolled into a small, tight ball. He took three of the tablets.
“You don’t mind, do you?” Dieckmann said to me.
“No,” I said. “I’d be glad to answer your question.”
“Would you?” he said. He said to Praccio without looking at him. “See? He wants to answer.”
“All right,” Praccio said. “If you have to be a fuck, go ahead.”
Dieckmann stroked his beard, and, for an instant, I thought he pursed his lips as though remembering something tasty.
“Go on and ask,” I said. I put my hands behind my head and touched the tips of the fingers and thumbs. The flow of something, a sort of electric charge, went back and forth and reminded me of times when I had swung on a swing as a kid, each time getting a little higher, the sky seemingly closer. But of course, this was dangerous. Was this the time to be relaxed?
“He’s got balls,” said Praccio. “You’ve got to say that for him.”
Dieckmann’s one eye lingered over my face.
“I’m glad to hear you are so cooperative,” said Dieckmann. “Yes. How brave.”
Praccio, the one with the piece of toilet paper on his cheek, pulled it away and looked at the dried blood with intense scrutiny. Then he put it in his pocket.
Dieckmann asked a question about a discarded photo he had obtained from the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. It had, he said, some unnoticed but interesting characteristics, missed, of course, by many of his colleagues. He glanced from one of the men in the room to the next. Even as he asked I thought of my father as he sat in the kitchen when my mother had told him about going to a motel room with another man. And the bowling alley. My mother spending afternoons at the bar of a bowling alley. The rolling rumble of the bowling balls, the crash of the pins.
“Do you mind if I write on the blackboard?” I said.
“No,” he said. “Not at all.”
We went through the equations together, one step at a time, Dieckmann’s eye like a laser pointer as it followed what I wrote.
“You won’t mind if I interrupt you here, will you?” he said.
“No,” I said.
“This is the point where it gets interesting, don’t you think?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “Or at least we are getting close to the interesting part.”
“Uhmmm,” he said. “Perhaps. Go a little further along these lines.”
The chalk broke. He waited patiently while I picked the piece up. The scent of Gloria’s hair was still on my fingers, and the golden light, as it lay across her skin, seemed so far away.
“Continue,” he said. “I think you are coming close to the item I am concerned about. It is not a large thing.”
He stroked his goatee.
He raised a brow. So? What was I going to do? Would I call his bluff? I smiled at him. He smiled back, although it was not the most pleasant smile I have ever seen.
“What are you two smiling about?” said Praccio. “Have I missed something?”
“The question cannot be answered,” I said. “Any answer would be wrong. We have come to the point where the observations, as obtained at this point, only suggest possibilities. We are facing uncertainty.”
“Ah, Jesus, Neils, that’s a new one,” said Jerry Stern. “You must have been saving that.”
“Have you got something else up your sleeve?” said Praccio.
Dieckmann sat for five minutes, his eye moving from the window to me, and then back again. I had the sensation that if I moved, if I showed any doubt of any kind, that he would manufacture something new. I dropped the chalk. He stared. Praccio, the chemist, peeled back the silver paper on the roll of Tums.
“No,” said Dieckmann. “I think that concludes our examination. Congratulations.”
He took a folded sheet from the inside of his perfectly cut, immaculate jacket, opened it, like some small thing, a bird, say, that was opening its wings for the first time, and held it out.
“This is a list of discarded photographs,” he said. “If you look at them closely, you might find something.”
“Do you understand what just happened?” said Jerry Stern to me.
“I was given a list,” I said.
“No, no,” said Praccio. “Neils has paid you the highest compliment I have ever seen in any of these examinations.”
Dieckmann said, “It’s nothing. Good afternoon.”
The pneumatic hinge at the top of the door he went through made a long, soft sigh.
So I stood in the hall, in that glare of the polished linoleum, and as the odor of the wax the custodian used came to me like order itself, Em walked away from the wall, where she had been leaning, one high-heeled boot against it. She had changed while I was in there getting grilled, and she wore her most spangly flapper outfit, one that had a pleated skirt. Inside the pleats were colors, and when she walked the skirt swayed, and the pleats opened so that the colors showed, from red to blue, just like the spectrum. Her dress was like something made from a picture of a star being born.
“So,” said Em. “How did you do?”
“I wasn’t too hard on them,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “Well, glad to hear it. And you know what I’m going to do. I’m going to take you out to a sushi place in San Francisco that serves fugu.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“The poisonous fish. Tasty if done right,” she said. “And one other thing. Just so you your head doesn’t get too swollen.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“There’s no tribe called the Adimi. No one puts his hands behind his head that way. I thought you needed a little placebo. Worked like a charm, didn’t it? There’s more to science than math and stars.”
AFTER BERKELEY, I came back east and bought a house not too far from my father’s. Not close enough, thank god, to hear that buzzing from the power lines, but still in that first habitable ring outside of Danville. About five miles away. It seemed that the town was a hydrogen atom and the haze of the electron, those fields left over from failed farms, were where we were condemned to live, in houses, in my case, that were built with lousy sheet rock from China that was applied to studs put up with nail guns (I could almost hear, on sleepless nights, the slight squeak of these nails as they worked their way out of the walls of my house). The house, of course, looked good. For a while. Then the cracks started to show.
Dieckmann’s letter of recommendation to the school that hired me implied that if I stayed with the work he had suggested, some of which might reveal the correct value of the Constant, so as to describe how fast the universe is accelerating, I could win the prize, too. What he meant, of course, is that I could look into biggest mystery there is. What is driving the universe so that some things, as large as galaxies, can seem to disappear? How did distortions in gravity affect such an occurrence?
Gloria, of course, stayed in California, and we saw each other once a month, or once every two months, when one of us took the red-eye to spend a little time together. We both knew this was not a solution, not really, and while we both were desperate for one, we didn’t know what else to do. So we took the red-eye and hoped for the best.
A thin reed, let me tell you, if there ever was one.
The danger, the emotional danger, was like living with a poisonous snake in the room. How long could we survive before the thing struck? The distance and the impossibility we faced seemed clear to me one morning after a visit from her, when I cleaned up the bedroom where she had dumped out her duffel bag and I found some sand, which she said had gotten into it from going to Zuma Beach. The sand glittered on the floor like stars. I sat with the stuff in my hands. Did it smell of her suntan lotion? I couldn’t tell.
I KNEW TIME WAS passing
by the way things changed. They ripped down the women’s jail, and they had to do it with jackhammers, since it was all concrete and steel. I drove by when the men took it down, floor by floor, as though all the pent-up desire and fury, so neatly stored in the building, came out now in the sound of steel smashing concrete. Somehow, when I was just far enough away, it sounded like loneliness itself. The library was still open, but two years after I came back Mrs. Kilmer died and I went to her funeral. It rained, and only five other people were there, strangers, they seemed to me, who had seen the notice in the paper and had nothing else to do. And each year, more farmland went under the knife of the developers; although the houses got bigger, they were built in a more shoddy way. Still, no one built any more houses near those buzzing power lines. Better agricultural land had become too cheap.
My mother had left Danville with her physical trainer a month after I had left for Berkeley, although it had taken her years of wandering around the country (in upstate New York, Utah, Arizona, and Washington State after she had ditched the trainer and she had tried her hand as a potter, a weaver, a maker of macramé, and a barista before finally settling into the ashram in Berkeley about the time I left to come back to Danville . . . she said we were trains passing in the night, but, of course, it was only that I had come back to look after my father). She left my father a note on the kitchen table about how she knew she was meant for a unique future. Her lawyer would be in touch.
My father and I went fishing together when one of us had bad news. Not just the usual disappointment, but something gone seriously or ominously wrong. The kind of thing that makes you think that if fate were a freight train, and an ill-meaning one at that, it had just gone by at a hundred miles an hour and left you standing in the coal-scented and vicious breeze of the near miss. I had heard, for instance, that a good friend of mine had committed suicide, or my father discovered that he had almost been fired in a budgetary cut, but had barely survived. On these occasions, and many others that scared us, my father and I packed our fishing things and went to Furnace Creek.
Gloria and I tried to make up for lost time when she came to visit, and we stayed in bed until we were sore and then went for ice cream, or we went to a good restaurant every night, or I cooked for her, morels and a rack of venison. A chocolate soufflé. She wanted to try things in bed that I had only heard of. The separation worked in the odd way of increasing the intensity of the time we had together, almost as though we were having an affair, and the forbidden part of it only made us more passionate.
At the end of a visit, we went to the airport, both of us so exhausted and sore as to be a little shaky, and, of course, we knew the time was grinding on us. It was the romantic version of holding a piece of steel against a grinder, sparks and heat. But, still, in the time they ripped down the jail, when Mrs. Kilmer died, when more houses were built, Gloria was going through medical school, which took her a year longer than she had thought, and then she had done her internship, which was about to end. Now she was going to have to decide about where she would do her residency. It built like water behind a dam. Either I had to move her way or she had to come here, but we tried to avoid this or to turn it into a sort of engine of desire.
And the separation had another aspect, too, which was that while it increased intensity, it also left us irritable, and it didn’t take much to get us saying those things you never forget. We missed each other. It was hard being apart.
We tried to compensate, too, by doing favors for one another. For instance, Gloria’s grandmother lived close to me, not far from Albany, and Gloria asked me over the phone one day if I would buy her grandmother a TV. Gloria was going to come to visit soon, I thought, but she wanted me to get the TV for her grandmother, who hadn’t been feeling well. A nice, new flat-screen forty-two-inch Blu-ray with streaming video from Netflix would keep her grandmother occupied between the doses of Oxycontin she took for a neurological disease that had no cure. The old woman lived just north of Albany, about forty-five minutes away.
“Do me this favor, will you?” said Gloria. “OK?”
“Sure,” I said. “You know I’d be happy to do that.”
“That way you’ll have it when I get there. I’m packing now. My flight gets in tomorrow at 6:00 AM your time. That goddamned red-eye.”
“Good,” I said. “Good. I’ll have the TV.”
“Ah, Jake,” she said. “You’re so sweet. You really are. We can talk when I get there.”
Danville didn’t escape the wrecking ball of the modern age any more than any other small town in the Northeast. Wal-Mart moved in, and the small shops on Main Street closed up, and then Home Depot opened, and the hardware store where my father used to buy trash cans and the new works for a leaking toilet turned into a dollar store. A couple of fires left gaps along Main Street, making it look like a junkie with some black teeth. Still, some places seemed to thrive, like Dunkin’ Donuts, a juice bar (the vegetarians from the school where I taught kept that going), some fusion restaurants, and, of course, a Radio Shack. So that’s where I went to get the TV.
The TVs were along one wall, all tuned to the same show. A bank of TVs like that always gives me the illusion of being confronted with a lot of information, but it is only the same thing repeated over and over. Some pictures were better than others, a little more blue or red, or a sharper picture. Mostly, it looked like the Japanese ones were the best.
Gloria’s grandmother had been watching a TV with a piece of aluminum foil wrapped around the antenna, and even with the aluminum foil it still only got two stations, depending on weather conditions. I bought a new one on sale, in the middle range, and I thought the best thing about it was the remote control. I paid for the TV, the pink slip for it in my hand, and the clerk said, “I’ll get you one in a box.”
A man came into the store when he said this.
The guns I know about are somewhat old-fashioned, you know, from the black-and-white private eye movies, like The Maltese Falcon. Or maybe a sort of science fiction one from a modern movie. But the gun the guy had was bigger and more modern than anything I had ever seen, even in a movie. The first thing I felt was that I was getting out of touch in some way, standing there and not even recognizing such a gun.
“I don’t want any trouble,” said the clerk.
“Good. That’s smart,” said the man with the gun. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and he had a little goatee, just like Neils Dieckmann.
The door opened with that little commercial sigh of a small mall shop, a little aaagh and hiss from the pneumatic hinge, and the man with the Hawaiian shirt pointed the gun at the woman who walked in the door.
The gun, or pistol, didn’t seem to be made out of metal, but a sort of high-grade plastic. I guess I felt dated by that material. I had always thought that a pistol was a pistol was a pistol, and that Sam Spade and his descendants would always have a Walther P38. And in one of those original shoulder holsters, too, but even these have changed, because now the shoulder holsters are set up so the pistol hangs butt down.
The woman still had red hair and freckles, although she didn’t seem so much fresh as a little used, a little rough, as though time had an abrasive effect. My hands were damp just looking at her, and it was hard to tell whether I was terrified of the gun or shaky because she walked in, just like that. It had an air of the supernatural.
What, in god’s name, was she doing here?
“Ah, shit,” said the man with the gun. “Get over there. With that guy.”
He pointed the pistol at me. Sara walked across the room, her gait not quite so inflammatory, but her movement still having that sultry quality, as though whatever life was doing to her, it wasn’t taking away how lovely she was. She stood next to me, and without even glancing at me, or saying a word, she put her hand on mine, as she never had done in the library, and the warmth of her fingers, the touch of her palm seemed to flow into my arm, into me.
“You do what I say and you’ve got nothing to worry about,” said
the man in the Hawaiian shirt.
“You don’t have to worry about me,” said Sara.
The man stood there. Sara held my hand.
“You look like trouble to me,” said the man.
He pointed the gun at her.
Sara, of course, could simply blow her top and say, “You motherfucking asshole, you with the gun, you piece of miserable shit, you scum sucker, you two-bit excuse for a turd,” and so on. I put my other hand to my head.
“Here,” said the clerk. He opened the cash register and took out the money. Four or five hundred dollars, I guessed, although it was hard to tell because of the way he held it. Maybe it was just a bunch of ones with a few twenties on top. The man in the Hawaiian shirt took the money and looked carefully at it. He was breathing funny, as if he had asthma. It was a fragile, labored sound that you’d hear in the middle of the night if a kid were sick. Gloria had said she wanted kids. It would be so wonderful, she said, to have a child. She was jealous when she saw a woman nursing an infant.
“This doesn’t seem like much,” said the guy in the Hawaiian shirt.
The clerk swallowed.
“Please,” he said.
The wall with the TVs appeared like the compound eye of an insect, a bee, say, and a hundred women in bathing suits walked across the hundred screens. If you looked at just one screen you could see that she jiggled a little, but it looked good.
“What the hell are you doing here?” the man in the Hawaiian shirt said to me. He put the money in his shirt pocket.
“Buying a TV,” I said.
“What kind did you get?” he said.
“Samsung,” I said.
“Why did you do that?” he said. “The Japanese are fucking everything up.”
“It’s got a good remote,” I said.
“Well, that’s just fucking great. Who do you think taught them about remote? Who wrote the book on remote? We did. The U.S. of A.,” he said.
He turned back to Sara.
“And what about you? What are you doing here?”