The Beautiful Miscellaneous

by Dominic Smith

  We moved about the control room, my father introducing me to physicists in short sleeves and jeans. I’d imagined lab coats. My father tried to explain the operation. The tunnel, I learned, was called the beam switchyard. The place where the subatomic particles roared into their targets was called the cave—a chamber where magnets and spectrometers lay waiting, where plastic tubes flashed blue every time the electrons made contact. Some graduate students were eating take-out Kung Pao chicken and monitoring the collision controls. Once the accelerator was warmed up, there were many collisions per second. I sat with my father at the front of the darkened room, though the only thing to observe was a small monitor that showed a series of display events—scatterings of lines in a cross section of tubing. The assistants huddled around, glowering at the phosphor screen. They held expressions of men watching violence—not physical violence like boxing or wrestling, nothing involving cheers and blood cries, but acts of defiance against matter: car accidents, bridges collapsing, buildings imploding. They stood waiting, arms folded, faces drawn, braced. The particle detectors, the lead apertures, all of it served this moment of collision. I stared at my father’s face and watched him blink when the monitor showed a vector-spray of distributed matter. “Bump,” he said, grinning. It was a pronouncement, delivered with a papal nod. The assistants laughed and loaded another event display.

  I tried to be drawn into the violence as I imagined it. But each collision display was anticlimactic; the idea of particles colliding at the speed of light was better than the reality. I wanted to stand inside the concrete tube and hear the electrons streak by, to hear a subatomic explosion.

  “Does it sound like a bomb going off?” I asked.

  A man with reading glasses perched on the bridge of his nose stared at me.

  My father said, “These collisions are beyond all of our senses. There’s nothing to hear.”

  After a couple more collisions, they had a little birthday party for me. My father, in a rare act of thoughtfulness, had brought a brownie slice from the airport as a surrogate cake. They didn’t have any candles so one of the men, a smoker, held his lighter on top and I blew it out. I ate the brownie and they went back to their readouts. Soon after, my father and I emerged into the sunny afternoon. The California sky was halogen-bright. We drove ten miles to our hotel, a place where the Particle Physicists of America had a group discount. My father and I ordered a pizza from room service and he let me watch television while he went over his notes from the accelerator. I flipped through the channels, trying to find something that would draw him in. Eventually, I found an old Three Stooges movie—Have Rocket, Will Travel—and my father sat on the bed beside me. The trio work as janitors at a space research center and accidentally travel to Venus, where they encounter a monster, a verbose unicorn, and a mad robot. My father grinned and chuckled as they escaped various misadventures. Although technically the movie had a plot, it was really a series of eye pokes, face slaps, and pratfalls. The Stooges return home as heroes and attend a black-tie reception. Despite their best efforts to be polite, Curly has a run-in with a couch spring. He ends up bouncing around the room with the spring attached to his rear end, bumping into famous scientists and dignitaries. My father gave out a full-throated guffaw, then wheezed into something silent and red-faced, as if this were the funniest thing he had ever seen in his life. I faked a laugh and he slapped me on the back. I’d never seen him like this. That a man who knew how to diagram an electron-positron scattering event found Curly with a spring in his butt endlessly amusing seemed like an eternal mystery. Was he, beneath it all, simply a fan of screwball physical comedy and fart jokes? Was everything else a veneer? I couldn’t be sure, but I wanted him to keep laughing.

  When the movie was over we got ready for bed. Two twin beds stood parallel to each other and I chose one and got under the covers. I watched my father strip down to his underwear. His white undershirt was tucked into his white boxers, and when he removed his tight black socks, there were grooves on his ankles from the elastic. I found myself staring at his feet. They were pale, hairy, and somehow silver. I looked up at the ceiling. In my mind, I kept seeing Dr. Benson shake my father’s hand, a solemn grip with the protective left hand on top. Surely it was the way statesmen and diplomats and mayors shook hands. I listened to the sound of my father assessing a number of sleeping positions.

  When he got comfortable he said, “Some movie, huh? Sometimes when I go to those faculty dinners I feel just like Curly. Like I could end up knocking the dean over by accident.”

  “That’s why Mom goes with you,” I said. “To stop you from killing somebody.”

  “I suppose so,” he said. Then, after a pause, “Good night, son.”

  “Good night,” I said, closing my eyes. In that moment, I consciously forgave my father for the likelihood that he didn’t know Disneyland was also in California.

  six

  For my mother’s thirty-fifth birthday I suggested my father order her a surprise cake, which he did. We went across town to pick it up. I was eleven. It was a prewar bakery with glass-fronted display cases of gnarled farmers’ loaves and plaited wedding bread. The baker was French, a man of talent and good taste, exiled no doubt by scandal or bad luck to our small town. He lived with his family and they didn’t mix outside of their business dealings, but despite this he had a cheery disposition, and insisted on serving the counter himself. My father and I walked in there ten minutes before closing and the baker was drinking a demitasse of espresso next to the cash register. Behind him, in the back, amid the steel racks of baking trays, his teenage son was sweeping the floor.

  “I’m here to pick up a cake,” my father said.

  “Ah, yes, Mr. Nelson. I thought about calling but I wondered if, perhaps, this was not some kind of surprise. Is this for your wife?”

  “Yes, that’s right. How much will it be?” My father moved closer to the cash register, his face down.

  The baker wore an immaculate white apron. He had a big, square jaw but soft green eyes that made him look to me more like a painter than a baker. “Well, I didn’t know whether you wanted…perhaps, some kind of message. I don’t know…‘Happy Birthday.’ You could choose and I’ll have Michael pipe a message with some frosting.”

  My father looked down at the glass counter, contemplating the pastries. I stood beside him, touching the base of a cake tray.

  “We could write her a message, Dad,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m aware of the possibilities, but here’s the thing: your mother doesn’t like a fuss. What if—?”

  “Mr. Nelson, we could just simply write ‘Happy Birthday.’ Nothing else. And I kept the piping bag aside. It would be no problem.”

  Again my father stared down at the unsold pastries—blintzes, strudels, Danish, croissants—the United Nations of baked goods. Was he deciding about the cake message or counting forms, categorizing the pastries by nationality and geometric shape? I looked up at the clock. The shop was due to close in five minutes.

  “I say we tell her happy birthday,” I said.

  “Yes, okay, that’s what we’ll do, then,” my father said. He stared out the windows at the dying afternoon.

  The baker smiled at me and called back to his son in French. In a moment the boy appeared with the layered chocolate cake and a piping bag. Tiny pearls of white icing clung to his hands.

  “This is my son, Michael,” the baker said. He pronounced it Mee-karl .

  My father, roused from his private speculation, turned reluctantly and looked at the cake, but not at the boy.

  “Hi,” I said.

  I watched the baker’s son unfurl beautiful white letters from the bag—a tightly looped cursive that was both festive and elegant. The baker nodded and winked at his son, who was clearly proud of his skill.

  “Michael here is going to own this place one day.”

  My father said, “Just the Happy Birthday for the message. You could include an exclamation point at the end—or�
��Nathan, is that a little much for your mother?”

  I couldn’t look at my father. I wanted him to ask the baker about his life, about his son and what kind of apprenticeship he had done. The baker, sensing my father’s lack of curiosity, tried to draw out interest like a drunk telling a story. His eyes locked on my father, who was inspecting a troublesome fingernail.

  “Michael has been baking for many years now. He started when he was six. He stood on a chair and measured cups of flour. Rye, wheat…it’s in his blood. In France my great-grandfather was the first to make sourdough in the north. He carried some yeast all the way from Switzerland in a handkerchief.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  Michael looked up from the cake and flashed me a smile.

  “I assume you put it in a box,” my father said.

  The baker stared at my father for a moment, then back down at his son’s steady script. Without looking up, he said in a low voice, “Of course it comes in a box, what do you think, I let you carry my cake in your bare hands?” He was convinced my father was the man who pushes past you in elevators and splits small restaurant bills with a calculator.

  My father nodded and bit his lip. The offense in the baker’s voice was as foreign to him as the previous attempt at camaraderie. He paid for the cake and we went outside and got in the car.

  “That was kind of rude,” I said.

  “Hmm?”

  “He was trying to chat and you ignored him.”

  “I did?” He narrowed his eyes at a point in the distance.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, what did he say?” he said vacantly.

  “You were there,” I said.

  “All the same. Some details?”

  “He said his son had been baking a long time and that he was going to take over the shop someday.”

  “And what did I do?” He turned to look at me, suddenly interested.

  “You acted like he hadn’t said anything.”

  He put his hand on the steering wheel, tapped his fingers against it. “Should I go and apologize to him?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I see.” It was a slight tone of regret, more at being caught than for appearing rude.

  “I mean, we come here all the time. Mom gets her tea cakes here.”

  “Fine, then. I’ll say that I was thinking about something else.”

  I looked out the window; night was surrounding us. “What were you thinking about?”

  He looked down the street, at the storefronts coming alight. “I have no idea.”

  “Maybe you’d better apologize.”

  He looked at me, nodded once obediently, then opened the door. I watched as he walked up the pavement, cake box in hand. He stood there in front of the windowed door. I wanted to follow him and hear his apology. A thin arm appeared and pulled down the old-fashioned blinds and twisted a sign that now read “closed.” My father stood there a moment, one hand poised to knock, the other hand, flat as a plane, resting beneath the cake box at shoulder height. After a moment he knocked. The door opened and the baker, now apronless, stood there in the last minutes of daylight, staring out at my father on his stoop. Some nods and head tilts, my father looking at the cake several times, gesturing to it. After a moment the bakery door closed and my father walked back to the car. He turned the engine over and we pulled down the street.

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “I said sorry and told him I had a reputation for this kind of thing.”

  “And he forgave you?”

  “Geez, Nathan, it’s not a crime. I didn’t rob the register.”

  A silence lasted several blocks.

  “I’ve never heard you say geez before.”

  “Well it’s your mother’s birthday. It’s a special occasion.”

  He tapped the top of the cake box smugly—a man tapping a briefcase full of money. “Your mother is going to be super surprised.”

  “Super,” I said, feigning excitement.

  “You want to know what I got her as a present?”

  “Sure.”

  “A Navajo Indian necklace. It’s made from turquoise and silver. She likes that kind of thing.”

  “You thought of that?” I said, surprised.

  My father looked down at the dashboard. “Well, a secretary who works in the physics department office suggested it. She knows your mother from a book club or something.”

  “Good thinking,” I said.

  “Yes, Mindy Monkhouse really saved my skin on that one.” A moment later he added, “Because I was going to buy your mother a new raincoat.”

  We drove the rest of the way home in silence. I watched the town roll past. People were out walking their dogs or leaving work with newspapers under their arms. I wondered whether all geniuses were plagued by simple errands, if they were unhinged by domestic routine. In my father’s mind finding the right birthday gift was more complicated than using trigonometry and the stars to measure latitude.

  seven

  During the accident I sustained a gash in the right side of my head. From the size and shape of the injury it appeared to have been caused by a flying object. A few of the doctors believed I was brain injured. They noted in the charts my lack of speech and occasional dreaminess and wondered whether this was more than standard coma shock. Since the brain swims in fluid, it could have bounced against the rear of the cranium during impact, injuring the left anterior lobe—resulting in things like speech problems or social withdrawal. They waited for things to change, for signs that I was the same before and after the accident.

  I stared out the window, watching the processions of high summer—the sun-dappled elms, the Day-Glo sheen of the cropped hospital lawn, birds flitting and wheeling above the telephone poles. My mind flooded with memories. A copper teakettle in a kitchen drenched with sunlight. My mother kneading bread, the windows chill with morning. The halting gait of my father on the stairs—a gangly bustle and a waft of talcum powder—as he descended for breakfast. My former life was a montage of images and smells.

  My mother, who’d been staying in the area, was the first one to see me after I woke from the coma. I sat propped with pillows. When she came into the room, her face was pale and drawn; there were ashen half-moons beneath her eyes. I recognized her immediately, but she came to me as a collection of objects more than a living person: the thin nose, the slender hands, the long brown hair pulled into a barrette. She was wearing the Navajo necklace that my father had given her for her thirty-fifth birthday. I couldn’t formulate any words. She set her purse down on a chair and gently placed her hand on my head wound—there had been nine stitches just above my right eyebrow. “Oh, God,” she said. “My boy.” Somehow, her voice was brown and seemed to stay in the air. She put her cheek to my face.

  One of the doctors stood beside her. “He’s still in coma shock. We don’t know all the test results yet.”

  She grabbed my hand and I could feel her pulse against my wrist. “Yes, I see. Nathan, I’m right here.” She pushed a strand of hair back from my forehead and I remember taking ahold of her necklace. I touched the edges of the silver pendant. “Is he all right?” she asked.

  “Fragile. It will take time.”

  The doctor left the room and my mother pulled up the chair beside my bed. She looked at me, crossed her legs. “Your father is on his way with Whit. You remember Whit Shupak, don’t you? Your father’s colleague. They were both here but had to return to the college for a few days. How do you feel?” When I didn’t respond she looked around the room. Her mouth pursed in the corners; she was on the verge of tears. “I’m afraid of what I’ll find when we make it back to the house. Things need repair. I suspect the eaves are rotting on the north side and God knows your father doesn’t know how to climb a ladder.” Now that she was composed, she sat there and spoke to me like a neighbor: how rising damp was claiming the basement, how she had planned her fall garden, how she hadn’t had any company in a long time. She folded her arms and stared at her f
eet and said, “You’re alive and that’s the main thing.” Then she opened her purse, pulled out a pristine handkerchief, and dabbed at her eyes. “You’ve been asleep for a long time. You must be starving! What would you like to eat, Nathan? If you could have anything to eat in the world, what would it be?” I tried to think about food but her words got in the way—tan-colored waves that got in the way of my hunger.

  eight

  Nathan was a solitary youth. That’s how my mother sometimes describes my early and pubescent years, before the accident, when I was a cut above average at the Jesuit school for boys. She likes to word things in a particular way. In our house, it was never a couch or a sofa, it was a davenport, a love seat, a divan. My father’s study—essentially a rummage of books and papers with a desk—was never called an office. My father wore trousers or slacks, never pants. My mother had been to Europe once, as a high school graduation present. This one trip, eighteen years prior, apparently gave her the right to refer to it as the Continent.

  But if I was a loner at St. John’s, it was because I was stultified by our quest for my hidden talents. I wanted to make friends, but I had adopted the stance of a kid who might someday have a college building named after him. Despite my lack of talent, I was hard to reach. And, in turn, the other boys were standoffish with me—for years they’d seen my father trundling me down to the physics lab at the college or whisking me off to a speed-reading seminar. They expected and feared great things from me. Then they grew suspicious when my mediocre annual test scores came out. A genius can be aloof. An unnaturally gifted athlete can set a new school trend. But the average and the mildly gifted—those flitting like tadpoles at the deepest place of the bell curve—are expected to be sociable and easy to get along with. I was neither of those things.