The Beautiful Miscellaneous

by Dominic Smith

  “I see, yes, from the context…”

  “All that fuselage and desert air, Indian villages, I’m hard as concrete all the time. The whole trip. It’s like the more we have sex the more I imagine roadsides and ditches, you know, doing it rugged.”

  “I understand now,” my father said.

  “The tour guide is out in the jeep smoking a cigarette and I go back to find Nancy. It’s still got the Berber carpet, the presidential seal woven in. It’s still got the mahogany armrests and the swivel chairs as wide as a bed. It’s still got the area for the cabinet members and for the chief executive himself. And I find Nancy sitting in the chair.”

  “The chair?” I asked.

  “The chair!” Whit boomed.

  “Nixon’s,” my father confirmed.

  “Her hair is dead straight from all the heat and dry air and she’s swiveling, you know, like a prom queen at a malt shop, and I come up beside her and she has no idea whose chair it is. I mean, you can tell it’s the throne, bigger than the rest, a red telephone right by the side. I turn to my new wife and I say, ‘Nancy, you’re the sexiest thing in this boneyard,’ and she about slaps me. I have this crazy idea. I can’t stop myself. I stand in front of her, my hands on my hips, the position of hope—”

  “What we’re saying is—” my father started.

  “He wanted oral sex, Dad.”

  Whit said, “Now, we’re still in the early days, the marital probation period, and I can’t just out and ask, so I stand there, looking out the windows at the sand and the DC-10s all chromed up, and I’m thinking happy thoughts the way they teach you in case you get depressed in orbit, about great meals and first cars and home-team football victories, and it feels like I’m waiting for a goddamn eternity. Unzip that fly, Nancy, for the love of Christ. I need this. And finally she speaks.”

  “What does she say?” I asked.

  “She says, ‘The day Nixon was impeached I fell down some stairs at work and broke my ankle. Whit, honey, isn’t that strange? Isn’t that a coincidence?’ I wanted to cry. I heard the jeep engine start up and gestured for Nancy to go outside. I stayed there for a moment and sat in the liar’s seat myself. I pictured him flying around, crossing the international date line, smug little bastard. I took a little swivel. That was the moment I knew she’d leave me one day. That was the moment I knew the ditches and roadsides would never happen. We were…married.” I watched Whit in the rearview mirror. He looked out his window. Nebraska grain fields streamed by, swatches of mown wheat.

  After that story there were hours without conversation. The familiar trees—the birches and pines and buckeyes—gave way to open, weathered fields, some worn to sod. Whit’s story was the flagship for silence.

  MY FATHER CHOSE A HOTEL for us the first night that featured deck furniture submerged in the swimming pool, slouching balconies, and stained brown carpet. Our room smelled of damp towels. Before bed, I made a neon line out of my father’s medication—lithium blue, hot pink, safety yellow. He took them without water, between bites of pizza. I memorized the Gideon Bible while I waited for sleep to come. My father and I shared a bed. He lay on his back, barely moving. I was aware of his breathing, the slight rasp that hooked into his out-breaths, the tension he carried in his bones. I was aware of time, not physicist’s cosmic time, not the bending kind that can be slowed or hurried, but the time of days and hours, the kind that knows the exact number of total heartbeats each of us will emit in our lifetimes. Now and then, Whit’s breathing climbed into fitful snoring. My father, his eyes closed, suddenly spoke.

  “Did you know the answer?”

  “When?” I asked.

  “Seventh grade. The question about Einstein.”

  I realized he was talking about the science fair; he made it sound as if it were something that happened earlier that same day. My hands felt cold.

  “I knew the answer,” I said.

  “I always knew that. Was it to get back at me?”

  “Not really.”

  “What, then?”

  “That was part of it. But mostly I didn’t want to hang out with you in the kitchen and graph sine curves. I’m sorry. I wanted you to be proud of me but I didn’t want the pressure. I figured you knew all along.”

  “But the mind…it wants to be tamed,” he said, with sudden evangelism.

  “Dad, you’re not normal. You should know that. Even now, I’m not a genius. I’m a guy who remembers things because he got whacked in the head and he sees and tastes words.”

  “You’ve always showed promise.”

  “I’m as smart as I’m ever going to be.”

  He sighed and rearranged his pillow. “Genius can arrive from across the void. Einstein’s ideas existed in the unified field before he ever thought them. Nothing is created from scratch. We’re conduits for the universe’s desire to think about itself.” He rested his head against the doubled-over pillow.

  “I’m being realistic about myself. If you thought with my brain for a day you’d realize.”

  “If you thought with my brain for a day you’d realize. Your memory is a portal. Tap it, tame it, use it, for Chris-sake.”

  I didn’t respond. Eventually, his breathing settled and he fell asleep.

  ON THE OTHER SIDE OF Denver, my father said, “At nineteen thousand meters the surrounding air pressure is such that the blood and fluids in an unprotected human body will boil.” Whit and I nodded in silence. Increasingly, his jibes and observations were beyond our reach. Whit was reduced to a man carrying out a penance; his puns sounded empty and forced. My father found it increasingly difficult to sleep and he developed a headache that lasted an entire day. Nevada was a seamless, tin-colored stretch of sky, an expanse of olive scrub. The image of my father dying in the backseat came to me. We had to get him to Stanford as soon as possible. We drove all night into California and stayed near the Stanford campus.

  The next morning we drove along the 280 freeway and the accelerator appeared below an overpass—two miles of tunnel, divided into sections that resembled freight-train boxcars. A steady stream of commuter cars rushed just feet above the accelerator tunnel. They were like colossal versions of the particles pulsing below—waves of electrons captured in the morning pall. We pulled onto the shoulder and Whit and my father stared out the window. Whit, who had never been here before, stared at the gray expanse, slack-jawed. It ended at the base of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Whit said, “Apart from the sight of Earth from an orbiting spacecraft, that is the loveliest thing I have ever seen.”

  We drove along Sand Hill Road to the main gatehouse and were checked in by a security guard after he confirmed my father’s name on a list. We were given visitor badges and drove to a parking lot where a few station wagons and minivans of families were unloading for a tour of the facility. A slight man with black-rimmed glasses stood waiting for them to gather. Whit parked and we walked over to the central lab building. Dr. Benson, the man I’d met on my tenth birthday, still with enormous sideburns and an outsize red tie, came striding through the glass doors. “Dr. Nelson, it’s good to have you back,” he said. “I always enjoy your articles on the charm quark. Charm is still your specialty, correct?”

  “Depends who you ask,” Whit said.

  My father shrugged. Benson laughed, smoothing his waxen hair with the palm of one hand. He appeared perfectly at ease with my father’s appearance; perhaps he didn’t remember the beard. He said, “Let’s drive down to the main control center.” We followed him to a white Department of Energy car and got in.

  My father said, “Can we see the tunnel first? Whit hasn’t seen it before.”

  “Of course,” said Dr. Benson.

  We drove a short distance, passed through another gatehouse, and pulled alongside the tunnel.

  My father said, “Nathan, since you were here they’ve upgraded the beam switchyard.” He turned to his colleague. “And the linac itself. What are we at now? Fifty giga–electron volts.”

  Benson said, “Correct.
I remember you came here with your son many years ago.”

  “Yes, in the late seventies for his birthday. Not long after they discovered the bottom quark at Fermilab,” my father said. His voice was nostalgic.

  “Seems like prehistory. We were much less advanced.” Dr. Benson looked at me in the rearview mirror. His shirt collar was frayed at the edges. “You were here in the dinosaur era, young man.”

  I nodded. In my mind those physicists were members of a strange Greek chorus, an amorphous collection of short-sleeved, hairy-armed men who’d spent their lives in labs and underground bunkers.

  “Many changes have occurred.” It was unclear to whom Dr. Benson was talking. I suspected the resident scientists took turns showing mortals through their billion-dollar particle amusement park. “We added a storage ring. New dipole magnets. A new electron gun at the western end of the tunnel.”

  My father said, “Klystron upgrades, no doubt.” They could have been talking about custom-built automobiles—their voices had the lilt and veer of an enthusiast’s obsession.

  Dr. Benson stopped the car and invited us inside the visitor’s alcove. We entered through a metal doorway and were suddenly standing inside the vast, fluorescent-lit tunnel. It housed enormous banks of klystron batteries and the air seemed to vibrate with a mechanical hum. A series of red and green lights flashed from the ceiling. My gaze followed an unbroken yellow line painted on the concrete floor. It extended for a mile, diminishing to a single point.

  We all stared down the tunnel in silence. Buried below us was the copper braid that carried the particle assault. Everything that we could see merely powered the collision. Dr. Benson said, “When my thinking gets cloudy I come down here and walk the line.” He made it sound like a reasonable thing to do, a stroll in a municipal park. My father touched one of the klystrons and said, “Dr. Benson, I assume I will be able to direct some collisions. I have some data I’d like to pull from the database of the field particle collaboration I worked on before.”

  “I figured as much,” Dr. Benson said. “We’re very sorry to hear about the condition.” Dr. Benson fidgeted with something in his pockets. “You realize of course how tightly we’re booked. We have physicists from sixteen countries here at the moment working on a new project. The team spokesman can give you full control of the beam switchyard for twenty-four hours and a desk. This comes out of the reconfiguration budget. Some lateral accounting. Grand Central Station is the situation at present.”

  “Thank you,” my father said.

  “We both know that nothing much can be found in a day. But I understand why you’d want to be back in the thick of things. I go on vacation in the Bahamas and I think about the accelerator.” Benson turned and headed for the door.

  My father nodded and took one final look down the tunnel before we went outside.

  WE SAT IN THE CONTROL room. It was a dimly lit space crowded with monitor screens, instruments, and industrial office furniture. My father sat at a console and stared at event displays from previous experiments. A barrage of scattered lines and angles of deflection. He conferred with the shift supervisor, Larry Dunac, and a postdoc about variables. The accelerator was still “warming up.” Whit and I drank coffee and ate donuts over in the corner. I watched my father trace a bony finger over the screen in front of him, his lips moving slightly.

  After an hour or so, Larry said that the accelerator was ready and the collisions began. Each event was stored in the computer database with a number, the day, and the shift. There were hundreds of millions of stored events—the accelerator had kept decades of collisions in a carefully arranged order. My father and Whit watched as the first events were pulled onto the screens. The shift supervisor and my father conferred. There was a vaguely military feel to the scene, men exchanging target locations.

  For twelve hours my father bombarded electrons with positrons traveling close to the speed of light. He walked the perimeter of the control room, wringing his hands behind his back. He talked about the possibility of a new field particle that could be coaxed from a collision with the right amount of energy. It would challenge the notion that there were only three generations of fundamental particles in the standard model. He changed collision energy levels several times and suggested that the accelerator wasn’t working properly. Larry and the postdoc listened patiently, but I suspect they knew they were watching a dying man clutch at straws. To coax a new particle into measurable existence was to win the quantum lottery.

  By evening, Larry lost the complicit quality in his voice, the congenial tone of an underling at battle. Dr. Benson dropped by and said he would be leaving shortly. “My wife is throwing a dinner party,” he said. The word throwing struck me; it was metallic and sharp and seemed incompatible with the frayed edges of his shirt collar.

  I’d spent an entire day in the stale-air confines of the control room and my mind was caustic. I had an impulse to call Arlen, the psychic at the institute, and ask him to search for the unknown particle. Could he pick up the particle’s psychic location? This kind of thing continued in my head for a while. I sat in the corner watching a muted television. I looked up and saw my father squinting at the screens, tapping his chin. I said, “What if there’s nothing left to find out there?” These were the first nonscientific words spoken in hours. Larry and Whit and one of the assistants stopped what they were doing and looked at me. Nobody smiled. My father rubbed his eyes wearily. A full minute passed. I could hear the second hand of a wall clock that I imagined was calibrated with an atomic source in Colorado. One by one they returned to their tasks. The thought was so impossible that it didn’t even warrant a reply. Although they thought it was highly unlikely to find a new particle in an afternoon with a series of known variables, they all believed physicists would keep finding more layers to the subatomic fabric. In a hundred years particle physicists would look back and see the 1980s as an era of child’s play. I went back to my muted game show.

  Hours passed. Larry loosened his collar, my father rolled up his shirtsleeves, and Whit stood barefoot, in his undershirt. Pizza boxes and soda cans, a newspaper folded so many times the pages had become soft, almost elastic. The world had been reduced to the size of a living room. People were cagey; my father avoided eye contact. He was entitled to use the facility until eight the next morning, but decency implied he would cut everybody loose before then.

  My father said, “I don’t understand. We have a decent statistical probability. We’ve combed the data, other people’s footprints, and still nothing…”

  Whit sat reclined in a chair, cracking his neck from side to side. He looked at my father and said, “View from the cockpit is that it’s time to land.”

  My father looked away, pretending not to have heard.

  An hour later, he called Whit and me over to the screens.

  “What is it?” Whit said.

  “I like the way the antimatter traces across the screen.”

  Whit and I looked at each other.

  My father said, “As you know, every time matter and antimatter collide they cancel each other out. They create nonexistence. In theory, there should be no concrete matter in the universe because when the Big Bang happened the cosmic checking account should have been balanced.”

  “But antimatter persists, despite the theory,” Whit said.

  “Correct. Dirac knew about this in 1928. He also knew that antimatter hides.”

  “Interesting,” I said, hearing the fatigue in his voice.

  My father stared back up at the screens. “Someday we’ll answer the question of where all the antimatter is hiding in the universe and why it sometimes appears out of nowhere.”

  “It’s getting late,” Whit said.

  My father folded his arms, resigned. “Death is not the same as antimatter.”

  “The sun’s coming up outside,” Whit said.

  “They both have a negative charge, but death is far too common,” my father said.

  “What do you mean?” I aske
d. I couldn’t help it. I knew we needed to get him out of there.

  “Life is the anomaly, not death.”

  Whit said, “We should leave, Samuel. These men need to get some rest.”

  “Whit, I want to play with this awhile. Go take a nap.”

  “Okay,” Whit said.

  Whit and I walked back to our seats and dozed while my father played in his subatomic sandbox.

  What I want to write is that at 4:15 a.m. on May 11, 1988, Samuel Nelson discovered a particle hitherto unknown to physics, or that he unraveled the mystery of why antimatter and matter do not cancel each other out in all cases. How a spray of light filtered across his phosphor screen like metal shavings glistening in green sunlight. How he woke Whit and me and announced his variables with the reverie of a man whispering the exact location of the arc of the covenant, or the shroud of Jesus, or any number of lost, sacred objects. But what really happened was this: he woke us at that hour with something new in his face, a certainty that he would die without a shrine on the altar of science, without naming a child of the atomic nucleus, and that certainty took the form of defeat etched in—his mouth stricken, his eyes dilated and lit with the pale incandescence of the control room.

  I didn’t need to ask for details. We were driven to the parking lot. The security guard waved as we drove past the main gatehouse. It was dark and moonless. The dogtooth Santa Cruz Mountains were all shadow and silhouette. We stood by the Oldsmobile and my father stared at the ground.

  historic assassinations since 1865 | 1865 apr 14 us pres abraham lincoln shot by john wilkes booth | 1881 mar 13 alexander ii of russia jul 2 us pres james a garfield

  thirty-two

  We returned to the hotel and my father slept off and on until the next morning. When he woke he stared up at the ceiling and called me to his bedside. “I can’t see out of my left eye,” he said. He held a hand over his right eye. “Nothing.” Whit came and stood beside me. “Call your mother and tell her to fly out here,” my father said. “There’s a good hospital at Stanford and you should drive me there shortly.” It was rehearsed. “I’ve prepared a living will, which says I don’t want to be kept alive artificially—no respirators, no heart stimulation. You will find this document in my coat pocket.” We helped him out of bed and he bathed in the tub. Whit looked up the hospital in the local phone book and called ahead.