The Beautiful Miscellaneous

by Dominic Smith

  I overheard Cal talking to his brother. “No, listen, stupid, K is the set of all statements of a language L on one hand, and M is the set of all models definable in a class N consisting of a definite set of objects and of definite sets of relations of order…”

  Dick Saunders, a little heavier, elbows on the table, cut him off: “Let’s cut to the chase. Do you know what that means, jerk-off?”

  My father didn’t hear the brotherly exchange. He squeezed my shoulder and leaned close. “Isn’t this place something?”

  I tried to make eye contact with Teresa, the medical intuitive, but again she avoided my gaze.

  AFTER DINNER I WALKED OUTSIDE to say good-bye to my father and Whit. As we walked along the gravel walkway to the Oldsmobile, my father jangled some loose change in his pockets and looked up at the house.

  “Your mother will like this place when she comes to visit,” he said. “It’s her kind of house.”

  We arrived at the car and Whit got in to warm the engine.

  “Wish I was staying. That meal was wonderful,” Whit said out the open window.

  My father took his hands from his pockets and handed me a brass compass. It was mountaineering style, with a lid and an eye gauge. He said, “I got you a coming-out-of-hospital present.” He stared for a moment at his feet. “The thing of it is, Nathan, we’re going to find something here to nail to the masthead. We’re going to find that thing you’ll hang the rest of your life on. This is the place for that. We comb the data, ask the questions, do you see that?”

  “Let’s see what happens,” I said.

  “Ready to board,” Whit said.

  My father started for the passenger side, then suddenly came back. He opened his arms and shouldered toward me for an awkward embrace. I looked at the ground and hugged him. I hadn’t hugged my father since grade school. He rested his hands delicately between my shoulder blades. I felt his twill coat against my face; he was still a good foot taller than I was. He smelled of vintage suitcases, of musty leather and medicated shampoo. I suddenly felt as if I were being left behind with strangers. In fact, I was.

  “If I don’t like it here…” I began, but he was already gone, sitting on the other side of the windshield. Whit got out and gave me a bearish hug, lifting me several inches from the ground. “We’ve got ringside seats, little guy. We’re here for the prizefight and we’re proud as punch. Drunk with pride we are.” Whit climbed back into the car and honked the horn several times as he rounded the gravel drive. He delivered a maniacal wave from behind the steering wheel. As they pulled out toward the street, I saw my father open a book and switch on his travel reading light—a meek cone of white light from inside the dark and swaggering Oldsmobile. Already he’d moved on, already this place had vanished.

  nineteen

  That first night I found it hard to sleep. The coma had left me with the occasional fear that if I fell asleep I wouldn’t be able to wake. Fatigue throbbed in my limbs and hands, but my mind was racing. I mentally recited average rainfall statistics to help me relax. I shared a room with Toby, the blind musical prodigy, and Owen, the autistic calendar calculator. Owen could tell you what day Christmas would fall on in 3026 but needed help tying his shoelaces. Tonight Owen had gone to bed early and snored extravagantly while holding the bedsheets between two tightened fists. Toby reclined on his bed with a set of headphones on. Bursts of opera came from his ears. I switched off the light and got into my bed. When the music stopped, Toby sat up and turned his face toward me. In the low-cast glow from the hallway, I could make out his broad nose and high forehead. His eyes stuttered through the dimness, shifting across my side of the room as though he were watching a landscape from a speeding train. He cracked his neck to the side. “So you’ve got some kind of special memory?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Is that what you’re in for?”

  “I suppose so. Words and sounds stay in my head. How long have you been here?”

  “Three months.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “The piano sucks. A fucking church-hall upright.”

  “Is Owen retarded?” I asked, looking over at his bed.

  “Mental case, dumb-ass, lowball…that gist of meaning.”

  “Oh.”

  “But Christ he knows the calendar. By the way, he stole a pair of my shoes, so watch your footwear.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  I looked out the window at the silhouette of the old barn and the corn-stalk horizon. I thought of my father and Whit on the road, somewhere near Dubuque, perhaps stopping for coffee and donuts at a diner. What was I going to do here for six weeks?

  Toby put his headphones back on and slumped against his mattress. The sound of trumpets and drums rose through the dimness.

  THE NEXT MORNING I WOKE early to find Toby gone, his headphones lying across his perfectly made bed. Owen was still asleep and I saw, in better light, his flat, moonlike face with its perennially wet mouth. I dressed and stepped out into the hallway, where I could hear the faint sound of piano music. I followed the music, drifting toward the west wing, where a music practice room and a classroom were located. I stopped short of the music room, listening to Toby play. Much of the piece took place on the right side of the keyboard, a sound like syncopated church bells. I stood watching from the door frame and saw Toby hunched over the keys, his face just inches from the white veneered edges. The faster the notes came, the more he leaned forward. His right foot pumped the brass foot pedal and I could hear his humming, forced through a falsetto, as he ravaged the piano. White, white, black, white, white. I saw the notes flash into the air; a series of high C’s came as a quivering manganese blue line. He descended into a slower sequence, allowing his back to straighten before he jumped an octave and landed an enormous chord onto a set of bass sharps.

  When he finished he breathed slowly and ran his fingers along the lip of the piano. His eyes fluttered. “Who’s there?” he whispered.

  “It’s me,” I said. “Nathan.”

  “Did you listen?”

  “Yeah. I’ve never heard anything like that.”

  “A Russian composer nobody’s ever heard of. He’s a flamethrower, don’t you think?”

  “He’s very blue,” I said.

  Toby shrugged.

  I asked, “How long have you been playing?”

  “Since I was five. Perfect pitch and I can play any piece of music after one hearing.” He came toward me, his eyes roving all over the place, and moved out into the hallway. “Let’s go have breakfast.”

  Toby ran one hand against the wall as we walked. We passed several bedroom doors before he stopped in front of one. “This is Teresa’s room.”

  “She’s the medical psychic?” I asked.

  “Medical intuitive. Sees gallstones and aneurisms and shit like that just from talking to sick people.”

  “Weird,” I said.

  “This place is the Taj Mahal of weird.”

  The door was decorated with magazine cutouts and photographs—black-and-whites of men diving from cliffs, trapeze acts, a cannonball rolling down a hill. At the bottom of the door stood ransom-note lettering that read: KNOCK IF YOU’RE NORMAL. We stood for a moment in silence.

  “What’s her door look like these days? She’s only been here a month and they say she changes her door decorations every few days,” Toby said.

  I told Toby what I saw.

  “I bet all she wants is a quarterback with nice teeth. Maybe a farm boy. She’s bored by the gifted,” Toby said.

  “You think?”

  Toby touched the artwork on the door, then suddenly looked up. “Shit,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You don’t smell that? They’ve burned the fucking toast again for breakfast. You’d think at a school for the gifted they would know how to operate a toaster.”

  Toby took off down the hallway, his hand running along the wall.

  twenty

  There was something depressing
about Gillman’s. During my first few weeks, the other guests and I lived in relative harmony, but a kind of loneliness floated through the high-ceilinged rooms. The cold, windy days came and went behind wine-hued drapes. The rooms were netted in shadow. There was little conversation at dinner and in the hallways. The smell of old carpet was everywhere.

  I kept to myself mostly. Initially, I underwent extensive testing. Dr. Gillman and a few associates from the University of Iowa orchestrated massive memory drills in a clinical room at the back of the house. I repeated manuals and catalogs, word for word and over several days. They tested my range and on-demand recall. They connected me to various measurement apparatuses during my recitations—tracking my pulse, my brain waves and metabolism, and the electromagnetic activity in my skin. They told me synesthesia was generated in the left hemisphere of the brain and came with a sudden drop in cortical metabolism. This meant that blood flow in the cortex decreased as compared to the normal increase during mental activity. They believed that my synesthesia was coming from the limbic brain, the old mammalian part, rather than the cortex, where logic and reason reside. Dr. Gillman told my father that my brain, based on all the physical indicators, found synesthesia very relaxing, that my brain-wave coherence increased. My father replied, “He dips a little deeper into the quantum soup.”

  After these testing sessions I watched television until dinnertime. The television room was on the first floor and, like the rest of the house, had the feeling of a grandparent’s den—doilies and tobacco-colored couches, lamps with enormous, yellowing light shades. The TV set was a 1981 Zenith console with a color screen that curved at the sides. It was housed inside a massive wooden cabinet that seemingly doubled as a side table, a place to set cocktails. If the TV ever had a remote control, it had been lost long ago. I was forced to sit close enough to reach out and change channels. But at least it had cable, and I mouthed along with the flashing river of voices. Pixilated streams flared and receded. Sometimes I would put the TV on mute to stop the noisy tirade. I would turn to the Weather Channel and watch a cloud front barrel across the continent. It gave me a strange sense of peace, seeing the jet stream hurl weather at the Midwest. For hours at a time I felt as if I didn’t exist.

  My head was still filled with television as I walked down the hallway to dinner. Our communal meals were stilted and filled with strange moments of eye contact. Dr. Gillman rarely made it to dinner unless new researchers were visiting. The math twins largely ignored the rest of us. Dick and Cal were members of the Culture Club of the Very Smart. They wore chinos with white socks, refused to speak on the telephone, and generally ignored anything that placed a blot on their mental landscape. They were like two halves of the same brain: finishing each other’s sentences about fuel spray trajectories and prompting each other with rhetorical questions. Roger, who spent his days making models out in an old farm workshop, had no mental prowess that I could determine and didn’t speak unless asked a direct question. Toby was the perennial cynic and wisecrack and Teresa was a willing audience, engaging him on occasion with her own banter. But there was also something withheld about Teresa, as if she cut conversations short for fear of her own impending boredom.

  I’d been raised in a household where my father ignored me unless he was holding up an intellectual hoop for me to jump through, and where my mother’s dream of family solidarity was all of us sitting in the kitchen eating pad thai while playing gin rummy. But even with this training in solitude and disconnection, I felt adrift. Part of me felt abandoned by my parents, whereas I think most of the other young guests felt it was the other way around: they’d escaped the domestic tedium, the docility and dotage of their too-proud parents. I still held a distant vision of my father overcome with pride as he welcomed me into his private club. I would find “something to nail to the masthead,” and everything would be different; we’d eat steak dinners together and wear matching blazers, and because now I was bona fide, christened in the holy waters of greatness, he’d be free to loosen up and talk to me about everyday things—his dreams, his boyhood, the attractive female students in his class—and I would teach him about baseball and we’d take camping trips together. We’d sleep in a tent under a dome of named stars and he’d tell me about the first time he’d kissed a girl. He’d tell me where to keep my condoms and how to handle standoffish fathers.

  That none of this fantasy could ever happen, no matter what the application for my gift, meant it stayed buried and lively, burned into my dreams. And during those first weeks I would wake, a hollow feeling in my chest as I rose from a dream in a darkened room, bedded in unfamiliar sheets. I knew I dreamed of my father but, as in real life, his presence evaded me—there were flashes of his beard, the sound of his voice calling across a lake, a tall shadow on a sunny stone walkway.

  twenty-one

  Most weekends, my parents and Whit came to visit. My mother, by now, seemed supportive of my time at the institute. They took me ice-skating in Des Moines and to Pella, where we stayed in a period-style bed-and-breakfast. We drove through rural towns and my father tested my memory. He brought new material for me to memorize—Gray’s Anatomy and the Handbook of Applied Meteorology. Apart from TV shows, I had memorized the 1986 World Almanac and Guinness Book of World Records. Each morning I scanned the Des Moines Register, capturing the obituaries and the personal ads. My mind was bound up in meteorological data, the bones of the hand, the sexual preferences of divorced stockbrokers. Every word and fact had its own secret, vibrant life. Sometimes the associated sounds and images were lovely to watch, as delicate as nets of smoke. The world was miscellaneous and random, but sometimes beautifully so—a yard sale of fine, unpaired shoes.

  On our driving tours of Iowa, my mother or Whit drove because my father frequently had headaches or eyestrain. My father sat in the backseat with me as we hushed along the autumnal roads of Iowa towns—Marshalltown, Grinnell, Dubuque—trying to pin down exactly what it was that made my gift possible.

  latitude longitude and altitude of north american cities | abilene tex 32 27 05 99 43 51 1710 | akron oh 41 05 00 81 30 44 874 | albany ny 42 39 01 73 45 01 20…

  “You see the words and numbers?” my father asked, looking out at the fields.

  “It’s an overall sense.”

  “What do you mean exactly?” He swiveled his body to face me.

  “Some words have a taste and weight. Some have smell and movement. They’re objects.”

  “Objects are particles and bundles of potential, really,” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  My mother turned back to us and interrupted his inquiry. “How about we stop and get some pie?” She made a point of never leaving me alone with my father, shuttled us between diners and historic points of interest, made light conversation in general stores.

  When we returned from these outings, my father and Gillman drank brandy in the dining room before my parents and Whit drove back to Wisconsin. That they respected each other was obvious—both men of science, both chasing the invisible, whether it was the source of a black hole’s density or the source of genius. They sat with long silences like Quakers waiting to be moved to speech. For brief moments their voices filled the dining room.

  “Some are born with phenomenal talent; it waits to come out,” Gillman said. “The rest of us are born with hope.”

  “The gifts find their way to us. A radio signal sent across the void,” my father said. I think he came close to finding the camaraderie he’d seen between Whit and his own father—but instead of model warships and a distrust for governmental authority binding them, it was the possibility that intelligence could be manufactured in the brain, that genius could descend.

  twenty-two

  Dr. Gillman invited me to finish out the school year at the institute and participate in a decisive study on memory conditions. I would join a small class for regular high school instruction and apply to colleges for the following year. My father was delighted with this plan and I agreed to
extend my stay at the institute. I settled into a routine of testing sessions, school, and long hours of television.

  In the months that followed, other guests came and went—people with apparent genius and people with a single, unusual skill. There were inventors of data compression algorithms and computer programs, discoverers of growth factor antibodies, but there was also a middle-aged man named Arlen who was a known psychic. He came every two weeks as part of the same paranormal study that Teresa was participating in. Arlen appeared to be a drunk, showing up to meals with malt whisky on his breath. Supposedly the FBI sent him the swimsuits and toothbrushes of missing children and he helped to locate them. Roger became a part-time resident but retained his workshop full of scale models. Dick and Cal both attended a conference in Nevada where they presented their new model for fuel consumption. They returned wearing matching polo shirts from a Vegas casino.

  I spent my afternoons sitting a few feet from the Zenith console—the altar of memory. I closed the drapes and let the chromium light of daytime television wash over me. The game-show hosts all had similar voices—a jaunty, smoky bravura. They seemed like somebody’s gin-and-tonic uncle who, off camera, dispensed advice about time-shares and horse races. These men in Brooks Brothers suits cracked the audience up with their scripted innuendos, and were secretly delighted when the putz from Indianapolis—the gym teacher or mutual funds manager—faltered on a question and won a vacuum cleaner instead of a cruise to the Bahamas. I sat mesmerized by the promise of a big win. But also by the certainty of one’s own fate. Not him, not today.

  After dinner Toby and I retired to our room and talked on into the night. He asked me about what people looked like, because he was opposed to touching people’s faces. “I don’t want to know how big their noses are or whether they have acne scars. Tell me what color their eyes are, whether Verna has cleavage.” So I told him about the way Gillman looked three feet to your left, how Verna didn’t wear a wedding ring.