The Beautiful Miscellaneous

by Dominic Smith

  She smiled from the corner of her mouth—not so much a smile but the consideration of one. It reminded me of Teresa.

  “What do I do?” I asked.

  She led me to the pipe, where the stalwart smokers stood bleary-eyed and limp. She took the end of the hose and placed the small wooden tip to her lips. One of the pipe attendants—it was like an amusement-park ride—lit the bowl and she sucked. Smoke streamed up into her eyes. She held the smoke in her lungs, then came and blew it into my mouth. I inhaled and tried not to cough. As I exhaled I noticed Darius looking over at me. There was a hint of disapproval in his face. I shrugged and took a hit on my own.

  “Do you want to eat some pumpkin seeds?” she asked.

  I contemplated that for a moment, trying to gauge its full meaning.

  “Yes!” I said.

  We walked out onto the lawn and lay on the grass under a willow tree. On our backs, we stared skyward through the boughs and overhangs. It was going on dusk and we watched the darkness come in measures. Now and…now…and now… I tried to count the increments of night. She told me her name was Amber. She kept reaching over to put pumpkin seeds inside my mouth.

  “I knew Darius when he was a boy genius, when his name was still Darius,” I said.

  “Taro still is a genius. He’s so sage, you know.”

  “Why didn’t you call him Sage?”

  “I guess we didn’t think of it in time.”

  “Is Amber your real name?”

  “No. Katie Keegan.” I wanted her real name to be Amber.

  “Something’s happening to my head, Katie Keegan,” I said.

  “Good.”

  She put another pumpkin seed into my mouth. I could feel my teeth vibrate as she grazed them with her fingers.

  I said, “Did you know they sell more toothpaste the day after the Miss America pageant than any other day?”

  “That’s way fucked up,” she said absently, her eyes scanning the heavens.

  “And the galaxies at the end of the universe are moving so fast that their light is never going to reach us. We’ll never see them.”

  “You know a lot of different things.”

  “The game of bridge used to be called whist.”

  She laughed through a sigh.

  I leaned over and kissed her. Her breath was smoky, her mouth half open.

  When it was done, she said, “That was a nice surprise.”

  Clearly that was the end of it; her voice carried finality, a declaration.

  We lay there for some time, watching the night harden against the sky. I told her about my life, about my brief death, about my father. At one point she said, “Resurrection—that is the sweetest thing I ever heard.” Then she fell into a deep, unrelenting sleep, a child’s sleep, and in some strange way I liked her for that. I put a stray blanket over her and left her dozing beneath the willow.

  I went to find Darius, but he’d left the porch. I walked through the house, now lit by candlelight. People slept huddled on the Turkish cushions. Two men were arguing about whether one of them had, in fact, touched the electric cooling fan with his tongue. “Licked the fan, man,” he said. “The tip of my tongue is broken.” I climbed the stairs and found Darius’s clothes sitting beside the flotation tank. I knelt beside the plastic tank and tapped gently. There was no response.

  “Darius, are you in there?”

  A muffled scratching, then the lid started to move and opened a crack.

  He said, “Hey, are you taking off?”

  His voice was disembodied, floating somewhere inside.

  “I’d like to try that,” I said.

  “You would?”

  “Can I try it?”

  “Sure, buddy. How’s your headspace? I try to avoid the substances.”

  “Fine.” I knocked on my temple for good measure.

  Darius opened the lid and got out. I’d seen more nakedness in that evening than in my entire life—I’d grown up convinced that my mother wore a swimsuit in the shower. “Get your clothes off and climb in. Now just relax. It can be a little claustrophobic at first. And it’s absolutely black. Let your body float.”

  I stood beside the tank and stripped down. He helped me get in. The water felt warm and thick. It had the temperature and viscosity of blood. Darius waited for me to tell him to close the lid.

  “Darius?” I called.

  “Taro.”

  “Let me call you Darius, all right?”

  “Okay.”

  “I could have won that seventh-grade science fair.”

  “Sure, you could have. But you knew what was waiting if you won.”

  “But I thought you were going to be something big. A rocket scientist.”

  “I’m me. Isn’t that big enough?”

  “Close the lid, Guru Kaplansky.”

  He lowered the hatch. He was right; it was so black inside that not a single photon could get through. The slosh and seep of the heated, Epsom-salted water and my body floating, that was all there was. For the first few minutes I touched the sides, just to make sure I was connected to something. A brief moment of panic came over me; I was convinced that he’d left the room and I would be trapped in there overnight. I pushed and kicked against the sides. I could hear my breathing amplified and echoed, as if through a cave. The marijuana had worn itself down to a humming sensation at the base of my spine.

  I relaxed and let my body go loose. I blinked into the darkness, black on black. In a sudden wave, I felt the senseless darkness of the coma and my miniature death all around me. Had they ever left? I reached for the events of that day in 1987. I remembered the sound of Hank Williams inside Pop Nelson’s truck cabin, only now I recalled it as sunlike, pales of spackled yellow light shining from the radio. The hills of the copper country were a dusty green. And Pop’s silhouette, as he plowed through the windshield, was quaking and silver. I remembered a sound—a dull thuck—that ended with a heavy, leaden feeling. Then a lick of static that now, through the perfect blackness, undulated as a steel-blue sine curve. Somehow, these memories were synesthetic. As if my brain had gone back and color-coded each moment. But was the static the sound track to my small death or the sound of coming back to life, of reentering the fray? Somehow, I had squandered my resurrection. I trawled through mental lists—car-repair procedures, tidal charts, historic trade routes, baseball scores, Nobel Prize winners, historic assassinations, scientific inventions and discoveries—and tried to speak them out loud. Many of the words and colors were still there. I lay there for a while, weightless and drenched in salt, watching words like zeppelin and Bengal flash, then fade into the darkness. I could have watched them all night. But then I heard a knock on the plastic tank and the outside world streamed in.

  forty-three

  Later that night I drove home slowly in a light rain. The night felt cracked open, alive with possibility. Whit and my mother were nowhere to be seen, so I sat nursing a drink in the parlor, watching the glint of my father’s urn. I drank two glasses of gin and sat, aware of my limbs on the leather couch, the pulse in my hands, a little drunk. Things were moving again. I heard voices from the upstairs hallway. I got up and slipped halfway up the stairs. At the end of the hallway, my mother and Whit stood outside her bedroom door. I leaned against the wall and crouched low, peering over the top step. My mother stood picking lint off the wallpaper while Whit yammered something about unappreciative college students. I could tell from their stances that they were saying good night. My mother was holding one of her favorite blouses.

  “I forgot to put this into the clothes hamper,” she said.

  “I’ll run it down for you,” Whit said.

  “Would you?”

  “Of course.”

  “You are very sweet to me, you know,” she said. There was nothing maternal in her voice. She leaned forward and hugged him, her face against his cheek. It was the longest hug I’d ever seen her give. I saw Whit hold his hands two inches away from the curve of her back, afraid to touch her. Then s
he was gone. Whit stood at her door and brought the favored blouse up to his face and touched his lips to it, the way a priest might bless a vestment.

  I went back down the stairs and into the parlor. I stood before the urn. A man who didn’t believe in containers and vessels, who told us that our minds were constellations of light, energy, and information, didn’t belong in an urn. It was like we’d put a mystic in a jam jar. I took the urn off the mantel and took it into his study. I placed it over by his record player and his jazz albums. Then I began flipping through his books and papers. Zero gravity was included in the title of at least a dozen books. The margin notes of the books said things like, logically Impossible or not quite Accurate. zero Gravity relies on two input variables: Spin and Electricity. Other margin notes read like notes-to-self from a dementia patient—anniversary on june XII, buy present and flowers; nathan’s birthday; think of science tie-in; check faculty mailbox each morning and respond — and all of them written in my father’s loping scrawl and with his idiosyncratic punctuation and capitalization. Had he possessed some grand system for his own life? An appointment diary consisting of a thousand dog-eared pages of physics books.

  I picked up a book entitled Zero Gravity and the Promise of Unfueled Flight. I flipped the pages, past diagrams of metal octagons rising through the stratosphere. Folded in the middle was a handwritten letter. I opened the letter slowly. It was a page of hotel stationery, divided into perfect quadrants.

  samuel nelson

  tumor patient

  Planet Earth

  to whom it may concern:

  this letter concerns the possibility that you exist. i can’t take this very seriously. but it’s late. my Wife and Son are asleep. they think i’m doing trigonometry. what’s the triangulation effect of our nearest star, the earth, and your left hand? that’s a joke. i know for a fact you have a sense of humor. Boy do you ever!

  i have felt for some time that there are anomalies of science that can only be explained by the presence of a meta-intelligence…YOU are the designation that we call “IT.”

  list of anomalies physics cannot explain (no particular order):

  i gravity. we still don’t know what it really is, how to measure it fully, where it comes from.

  ii the transition from the Big Bang to the first Life-Form—how did hydrogen become an amoeba?

  iii why antimatter is possible. how can the opposite of existence exist?

  iv whether black holes are portals.

  v why I’ve never been very good at being a husband and a father.

  if you exist then we need to discuss certain things. if we assume for a moment you are who you claim to be, then empirical evidence suggests you operate on some kind of divine plane. well then didn’t you make me this way? why have i my whole life wanted to explain everything be told nothingand be free to get up from a table of people and just be with my thoughts? you did that to me. i see myself sometimes but i don’t stop myself. i feel…Entitled.

  look at me. i swore i would never—

  who cares?

  Light Waves, Centrifugal Force, these i understand. Motion reduced to Potential. i understand. but why you made me a man who was destined to die before i knew what it all amounted to, that is one thing i will never understand, you Bastard.

  forgive me. i’m a little bitter. i’ve worked my whole life, chasing something that might be nothing more than a piece of dust falling off your cloak. watch out for my Family, please. don’t let them bury me. scatter my ashes at the Accelerator—the one place in my life where i felt like i understood why people went to church to call out your name.

  sincerely: samuel nelson

  I QUIETLY CLOSED THE DOOR to the study. I took a Thelonious Monk album from the shelf and put it on the turntable. When I set the needle it released a bright, golden surge of piano playing. Not a single chord sounded predictable—a bread-crumb trail of notes that never felt fully resolved. It was music that was open-ended, subject to the uncertainty principle. My father told me that a critic had once said that listening to Monk’s skewed but brilliant sense of timing was like missing a step in the dark. That was exactly how it felt.

  I looked around the study and suddenly wanted to commit to memory everything in the room, a hundred thousand pages of formal logic and speculation. I was sitting inside a room of his mind. These books were his trapped thoughts. Monk ravaged the keyboard and I allowed my sobs to come out whole. It felt inevitable, unstoppable, water through limestone, the last cry of my childhood. My tears spilled everywhere, spidering the ink on the letter, dropping onto his scientific papers that were now neatly stacked. Here, science, a human tear. A drop of brine that under laboratory conditions behaves exactly like seawater, with one notable exception: it has a lower boiling point.

  I SAT THERE FOR A long time thinking about our future, how we’d given my dead father the key to our lives. I left the study and collected the bottle of gin. I went down to the basement, where Whit had his transmission room. Whit was sitting at a small table—a grown man in monogrammed fleece pajamas. The overhead light was covered in wire mesh and it sent little shadow lines across the room. The radio appeared to be made of sculpted chrome, like old appliances and automobiles, the toasters and fridges and Cadillacs of the fifties.

  “Hello, Whit,” I said.

  “Howdy.”

  “Quite an operation you’ve got here.”

  “Does the job,” he said, glancing around.

  Whit moved a dial and flicked some switches, and before long I could hear garbled voices. There were waves of static, then the muffled intonation of a foreign language. Voices came at us as if through a tunnel. All around me the walls were alive with bolts and awls, tempered steel, hand tools, bottles of my father’s home-brewed amber ale.

  “You mind if I have a turn?” I asked.

  “Go right ahead,” he said. He moved the microphone and I sat down to it.

  “Dad, I don’t know where you are, but I read the letter you wrote to God. I hope you don’t mind. I’ll make sure we scatter your ashes.” I took a swallow of gin, relishing the coated sound of my words. “Whit, have yourself a drink.”

  “I could use a shot of hooch,” he said. He took a swig from the bottle.

  “Do you want to say something to my father?” I asked.

  Whit ran his fingers against the bottle. “Do you think he’s listening?”

  “Sure he is. Say something.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. The sound of liquor on a nervous throat.

  “Let’s hear it,” I said.

  I moved the microphone in front of him. He took another sip of gin. “KC2DJL to Samuel Nelson, do you copy?” Silence. Radio waves sighing toward the vault of heaven, toward the pinhead source of everything. Whit put his mouth so that it was almost touching the metal lip of the microphone. “Hope you’re doing well out there. Give my regards to the space plankton.” Whit paused, grinned nervously, looked up at the wall, trying to make something more profound out of his words.

  “Tell him you’re looking after my mother,” I said.

  “How’s that?”

  “You heard me.”

  He swallowed. “Everything is fine here. I’m looking after the house, making sure it doesn’t fall to the ground.”

  “Good,” I said. “Now you can say good-bye if you want.”

  “Adios, then, Samuel,” Whit said. He fell into an astronaut’s posture—straight-backed, equally braced for mystery or calamity.

  A squall of white noise came through the speaker. I looked over at Whit. He was stone-faced, adjusting the reception. I took the microphone. “Also, I suspect that Whit and Mom are in love.”

  Whit gripped the bottle.

  I spoke close into the microphone. “Dad, this house is cursed with your memory. Don’t take that the wrong way. I think you’re indifferent to what we do. It’s us who are holding back. I’ve been so afraid of letting you down. The thing is, it’s even possible to fail at doing nothing.”

>   I moved the microphone to the edge of the table, halfway between us. “It appears you’re in love with my mother,” I said.

  His mouth puckered in the after-bite of the gin and he raised his eyebrows. He held up his hands, as if at gunpoint. “Affirmative,” he said.

  “We just told my father about it.”

  “I see,” he said.

  “I found a letter in his study. He wanted his ashes scattered. She won’t love you as long as he’s in this house. The urn…”

  Whit adjusted a slipper. “Where would we take them?” he said, whispering against his own will.

  “The accelerator at Stanford,” I said. “Up in the mountains behind the tunnel.”

  Whit looked at me, his face contemplative. “Your mother will need some convincing.”

  “Leave that to me,” I said. A burst of human speech came from the radio, and in my state I considered that it was my father calling out to us from the other side. It was hard to make out. We both leaned closer. It was a police radio, and the dispatcher was assuring the listener, an officer in the field, of armed backup. There was a pause and then a man said, “I’m not going to wait here any longer.” It had the veracity of overheard conversation, the undeniable sheen of accidental truth.

  forty-four

  The next evening I invited my mother out for dinner. She suspected bad news and dressed somberly—a gray skirt, a mauve scarf, her hair up in a French twist. We sat in a booth. She scrutinized the menu as if it were a real estate contract she was about to sign. Everything was brushed metal and mosaic tiles, Mediterranean colors. I’d chosen this restaurant to set her at ease, to evoke the terra-cotta charm of Italy, a country she’d always felt an affinity for, but everything annoyed her: the temperature of the meal, the island-like grease stain on the waiter’s apron, the prices. I rested my elbows on the table and leaned my chin into my hands, looking at her.

  “What is it?” she said, mildly irritated.

  “This is painful for you. Eating out.”