The Beautiful Miscellaneous

by Dominic Smith

  “Fucking cheese farmers,” he said.

  “There’s a problem here,” Teresa said, staring into the engine, “a system problem.”

  “It’s not an organism,” I said.

  “The problem is people are barbarians. Listen to them. Like hyenas out on the savanna.” Toby put his fingers in his ears and winced. “I came to the country to get away from this mob mentality. Close it up,” he said. He placed his cane on top of the roof.

  I let the hood fall. He grabbed my shoulder and lifted himself unsteadily to stand on the front fender.

  “Um, what are you doing?” Teresa said.

  He moved across the hood, toward the windshield, and stepped up onto the roof of the car. He retrieved his cane. The metal sank and popped under his weight.

  “Enjoying the moment,” he said.

  The car horns rose still louder, but now some of them joined in with appreciation for the sight of a man standing on the roof of his car. The white cane angled from his body, attached at the belt. Toby closed his eyes and tensed his shoulders like an Olympic weight lifter, somebody about to clean-and-jerk twice his body weight. Then he raised his arms slowly into the air and began conducting the cacophony. It was possible that every single motorist on the freeway sounded their horn, some in anger, some in a kind of stilted elation. People pointed and applauded; a man in a pickup pumped his horn and rambled to himself, already hearing the story he would tell his workmates the next morning. The sight of a blind man suspended above a fleet of cars, conducting the symphony of pissed and waiting motorists.

  Toby swayed and grinned wildly; one arm was up high, guiding the altos and the sopranos, while the other, down low, captained the basses, the bassoonlike blares, the foghorn semis. He did this for what seemed like a long time but was probably only thirty seconds. Teresa and I watched, stunned and exhilarated. The cars behind us began to merge with the traffic to our right. Some people called out as they moved slowly by. Toby bent at the waist in a samurai bow. A man called out from his truck, “Hey buddy, thanks for the show. That car is a freakin’ pile of junk.” To which Toby pointed in my general direction and said, “It’s his name on the title.”

  I helped Toby step down off the car. “Nice performance,” I said.

  “I thought the tenors were a little shabby.”

  A moving van stopped and two guys in coveralls came trudging toward us. The side of the van read WHITE GLOVE MOVING—THE TOUCH OF SOPHISTICATION.

  “You need some help moving this clunker?” one of them called, a cigarette hanging from his mouth.

  Now was not the time to defend the Oldsmobile and all it had endured. I quietly nodded. I got inside the car and pushed down on the clutch. Toby and Teresa stood by as the two men pushed on the trunk and I steered onto the shoulder.

  “You want me to radio for a tow truck?” one of the men asked me.

  “Unless you have a blowtorch in your van,” Toby said.

  “Please,” I said. “That would be great.”

  The men hauled back to their van and drove past us without so much as a second look. The death of a twenty-year-old car wasn’t even a blip on their morning radar; they were on their way to move antique vases or Queen Anne furniture while they wore white cotton gloves at the end of their hairy, tattooed arms.

  “This feels terminal,” Teresa said.

  “Dead. Kaput. No more,” Toby offered.

  “This car will outlive us all,” I said.

  We all got back into the Oldsmobile and waited for the tow truck.

  WHEN WE ARRIVED HOME TERESA and I left Toby to the sound of Whit’s calisthenics, the huff of his fight against mortality, and took the stairs to my bedroom. Upstairs, I felt a sudden pitch of nostalgia for the contents of my room, precisely because I knew that tomorrow I would clean it all out, box the chemical glassware, the beakers and the flasks, pack the science books and the microscope, and trundle it all down to Goodwill, where a family whose idea of fun was effervescence and magnification would pick it up for a song.

  “Tomorrow I’m going to clean this room out. Give it all away,” I said.

  “I can help you.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  Teresa slumped on the bed.

  “I know a woman who cured her cancer by cleaning out her garage.”

  I went and sat at the small desk that supported my junior microscope. The magnification was slight; with an instrument like this, molecules appeared as amorphous brown planets.

  “What are you doing?” Teresa said. She came and stood beside me.

  I fingered through the collection of glass slides, the trapped compounds and minerals. I found a slide that my father had given me. It contained a single molecule of hydrogen. He’d called it a sliver of time, the spark that set the universe ablaze. I slid the plate into position and squinted into the eyepiece. The hydrogen appeared grainy, a fuzzy whorl, a thumbprint slightly out of focus. I could hear Teresa breathing behind me.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “My father thought molecules had memories, that the history of the universe was trapped in their structure.”

  “Let me take a look.”

  Teresa leaned forward and put her eye over the microscope.

  “What do we have here?”

  “Hydrogen.”

  “Looks like a gallstone.”

  Her hair hung close to my face.

  “Hold still,” I said, pulling a single strand of hair from her head. “Let’s do some hair analysis.” I put the hair into a fresh glass slide and put it under the lens.

  “Hair has memories, too,” she said.

  “I see a lot of drug use.”

  “Let me see.” She leaned forward again, squinting at her own hair. “That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. Rope with little furry things attached.”

  She went and slumped on the bed. I leaned into the eyepiece.

  After a long silence she said, “Do you ever think about kissing me anymore?”

  I felt my pulse in my ears. I looked up from the microscope and saw that her eyes were on the ceiling. I got up and went to lie on the bed beside her. We both looked up at the Milky Way before she finally took my hand and kissed the back of my knuckles.

  “Superman could orbit our bodies,” she said.

  “My mother has a set of Inspector Gadget sheets tucked away in a closet somewhere.”

  We got under the covers and the house slipped away. Everything went quiet. A slow procession of kisses under a tent of superhero bedsheets. The unpeeling of clothing. The breathiness of our words, the little ironies of insight and humor, the comments designed to assuage the initial awkwardness of our two bodies enfolded. I was nervous about having sex for the first time and could tell, by the way she touched me, that she had done this before. I was praying that the sealed packet of condoms in my dresser had not expired. I closed my eyes and tried to relax. Then Teresa whispered my name and it appeared before me, perfectly rendered and, strangely, in my father’s loose handwriting: nathan It was the same unremarkable scrawl he used for a Greek-lettered equation, a letter to God, or the margin note in a book about gravity. He didn’t bother to capitalize or punctuate most of the time; if the outward pull of the universe warped time, then what business did we have capitalizing our names or using commas to give us pause? But here was the mirrored symmetry between the na and the an, holding my name together like bookends, and the subtle peak of the th; and all of the letters appeared loosely strung together and winking like delicate beads of glass.

  forty-seven

  It is four in the morning and I sit by the kitchen window, watching the hour of bakers in the streets below. A single guest-room light is on at the budget motel across the street. It is, in fact, the darkest and coldest hour before dawn, and as I look below I see only a few cars. A newspaper delivery van and a police patrol car prowl the emptiness. I am aware of the apartment. Like my mother, I can expand my awareness to take in all the rooms of a house at once. There are times
, especially sitting by the window in the embryo of day, when I imagine I can hear the appliances—the toaster, the alarm clock—drawing current down from the walls.

  Each morning I sit and rehearse my lines. This has been my practice now for several years. I transit from sleep and dreams directly to the role at hand, to the conjured life. Today I am speaking the words of Hamlet by rote. It’s a role I have wanted to play for some time. What has kept me back until now is the feeling that the role was somehow too personal: a son who loses his father, a ghost on a rampart, grief tinctured with madness. My method is simple: I memorize the play, not just my lines but everybody’s, from the soliloquy of the king to the stray lines of the messengers. I internalize the information, make it my own. Hamlet’s words, as I say them, are a series of sensory experiences. His character is the sum total of all these blobs, textures, and tastes; the word rank, addressed to Gertude, actually makes my mouth go bitter. It tastes like an old house key, and when I say it I feel a surge of remorse. Most of the time the sensory experience of the words and the right emotion can be matched in this way. But I also invent words for him, to better understand his mind. Sometimes I walk the streets and try to find Hamlet’s words for ordering bagels or coffee. I imagine the way he would leave a message on an answering machine.

  Without knowing it, I spent years preparing to be an actor. The summer I spent watching people in my hometown, reducing their lives to a single gesture. The nights at the institute I spent mimicking the drawl and slant of TV actors’ words. Watching people and finding their lives more interesting than my own. Feeling empathy to the point of identity loss. But it wasn’t until I came to control my gift that I found a use for it. My synesthesia returned to its fullness—but in a more manageable form—once I got out from under the weight of my father’s death. I learned to modulate the world as it sung its hymns of information at me. The world did not need a mind stuffed with trivia. But there is always a place for story, the reflective surfaces of woven lives, the illusion that time is suspended and I am not me up there. There is something like quantum physics going on here. At some level, when I walk around up there onstage, I merely allow the information to pass through.

  Later today, Whit and my mother will arrive for a two-day visit. They will be, unequivocally, themselves; Whit alive with chatter (he’s discovered renaissance fairs), mother cooking nonstop and hauling in flowers—daisies and daffodils, the plain and optimistic flowers of the fields. They will sleep in the same room but out of respect, or imagined respect, for the memory of my father, they will not be seen touching each other. We carry things; it’s as simple as that.

  SINCE MY FATHER’S PASSING, PHYSICISTS have learned more about the neutrino, the subatomic particle that makes the quark look like old news, like Newton’s apples rotting in the quantum orchard. The neutrino is a particle that has mass but is also pure energy. The vast emptiness of space, the blackness, they think, is made mostly of neutrinos. This particle can pass through a trillion miles of lead and leave no trace. It is both object and nonobject, contained in every cell of our bodies. It seems we are made of pure energy and light, and it just happens that the aggregate has mass. We move among the constellation of everyday things, little pockets of nonmatter who are insistent that our borders are fixed. These are the thoughts you get at the hour when dough rises and cops on the overnight shift refill their coffee cups.

  I won’t be so terribly disappointed if they discover that the universe is not unified. My father looked for elegancies of form and structure, the way a neuron might be a hologram for the entire universe, as if creation were an errand for an inspired bureaucrat with a rubber stamp, forever replicating at various levels of scale the cosmic ink stain. But he never could properly explain the anomalies. The psychic who dreams a missing child back into the fold, the musical prodigy who hears concertos in city traffic, the medical intuitive who sees the fabric of human illness and demise. Are these elements of the whole or elements of the uncategorized, members of the miscellaneous? Not just appealing mysteries, either. The fatal plane crashes, the atomic babies with mutilated organs, the fact that every one of us knows good people who meet with cruel and unusual punishment at the hands of the clock of fate. Surely, there is randomness. And information cascades with a life of its own; it’s not out there waiting for the grand interpretation, it’s weaving stories, showing up to the party of the living like a man with scraps of paper in his pockets.

  But what can be learned from trivia? A history of inventions reveals we made the gun silencer (1908) before air-conditioning (1911), the kaleidoscope (1817) before Braille printing (1829), cocaine (1860) before penicillin (1929). It’s a story about pleasure before usefulness, about ingenuity in killing before improving our everyday lives.

  IN MY EARLY THIRTIES I am prone to nostalgia. I keep in touch with Toby by phone and exchange cryptic e-mails with Darius Kaplansky every once in a while. These connections seem important. Teresa and I write letters. For a year we shared a Madison apartment, tried to be adults in love. Then the present began to reveal itself and she chose a date to return to the East Coast. Now, years later, she’s pregnant by a cardiologist in Pittsburgh and she sends me photos of her growing stomach. She knows it’s a girl and that it’s healthy. She knows this the way she knows the terrain of human enclosure, only now it’s her insides she daydreams about. Strobe-lit images of the unborn child, swimming in the amniotic ocean. She is fearless, confident as a bronze bell. She does yoga and takes walks before noon.

  Her pregnancy has made me think of my own beginnings. Not long ago my mother brought me the metal trunk containing the family film archive and the old sixteen-millimeter projector. My parents exposed a mile of celluloid that first winter of my life—as the South Vietnamese pushed toward Laos, as elections began in India, as astronauts played an impromptu game of golf on the moon. There are a dozen canisters and reels, coiled bromides of domestic fantasy. My parents playing house, living in lamplight and soup steam, scooped inside their wintry nest; my father, occasionally bare-wristed, watchless, attempting minor household repairs and the bathing of his new son; my mother breastfeeding me by uncurtained windows, watching trapezoids of sunlight move across the lawn. There are aimless sequences, my father at the camera helm: blurred textures, looming brass door handles, then a stream of sky, shots of snow, the blue glimmer of a winter’s night.

  But somehow I am drawn to that single reel of them before I came along. There’s something closed-circuit about it, as if this were surveillance footage, a private investigator out to nail the case for suburban monotony. Quiet breakfasts, fires in the hearth, my father reading at the kitchen table, my mother kneading bread. My mother chitchats, my father mutters, they share odd little moments—laughter at a misplaced set of keys—and most of the time the camera is on a tripod, clicking away, spooling tedium from the fathoms of time. But at the end of this reel there’s a montage that stuns me. My parents stand on a windy hillside beside the sea. It’s some kind of vacation, possibly Maine. My mother is pregnant and stands with one hand on her stomach. There’s a lighthouse and fishing trawlers, the sky is dark and brooding, and a bell is sounding somewhere in the distance. People are hurrying to their cars, the boats are coming ashore, sails are being furled; it may be some kind of provincial storm warning. My parents appear unfazed, as if the commotion is unwarranted. My father looks around him, nonplussed, like he’s witnessing a commotion of the devout, a call to vespers. My parents stand their ground, watching lobster fishermen and vacationers haul across the hill. The last image of that film, just before the camera is switched off, is my father and mother waving at the camera. At first it’s a bemused gesture—tourists pulling a prank—but then their faces grow earnest. It’s the poignant, solemn wave given from the decks of departing warships. For once my father looks dead into the eye of the camera, his gaze unwavering, the wind playing havoc with his beard. Strangely, it seems he’s waving at me—at the unborn, at the person he hopes and imagines I will become.
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br />   acknowledgments

  I am deeply thankful to the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin for moral and financial support during the early phases of this novel.

  Special thanks to Darold A. Treffert, MD, who consulted on the film Rain Man, for sharing his expertise on savant syndrome and prodigious memory. Also, in that regard, I benefited from A. R. Luria’s classic memory study The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory. In particular, the synesthetic examples and clinical test results pertaining to Luria’s subject S inspired some of my own fictional details. Any distortions based on these sources are due to my error, not theirs.

  Neil Calder, Director of Communications at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, was extremely helpful in answering my questions and refining my fledgling knowledge of particle physics. Thank you.

  My sincere and heartfelt gratitude to Thom Knoles for offering up his childhood story of having an astronaut come over for family barbecues. Likewise, thanks to Jeff Waite for inadvertently giving me the idea for the novel’s title.

  Thanks to James Magnuson, Elizabeth Harris, Vivé Griffith, Steve Gehrke, and Darin Ciccotelli. They each read early drafts of the manuscript and shared their insights. A final and special thank-you to my daughters, Mikaila and Gemma, and to my parents and three sisters for their long-term encouragement and love.