by Paul Dueweke
As Elliott continued along the aisles overflowing with smiles and flashes, drops of sweat formed and fell from his nose. His eyes became frantic and squinted as he zigzagged his way down each aisle, pausing only enough to check out the ribbon on each exhibit, leaving a trail of jostled people behind him. The people he encountered had no faces, no names. He was as ignorant of the feelings in his wake as he was of his constant mutterings. He stopped a couple of times to reread the Dobbs comment he clutched in his left hand. “This project is devoid of the human qualities—”
“Who the hell is she?” he muttered, bumping into the faceless Mr. Compton, who tried to ignore the intrusion as he resumed a conversation with the chairman of the school board. “This is all bullshit, not science. Doesn’t Dobbs know the difference between bullshit and science?”
He rounded the corner of the last aisle and came face to face with Richie Stevens, who was ecstatic about winning the first prize for the sixth grade. He elbowed Richie aside to gain his position in front of a neatly executed geologic cross section of the valley beneath the city. The various strata were represented by different colored sands in a plastic case that must have spent its earlier life as an ant farm. “So, Mr. Stevens plays in a sand box and wins a blue ribbon. You must be very proud of your sandbox, Richie,” Elliott said to the young boy as his mother pulled her son aside, whispering something in his ear. Then Elliott asked him with a grin, “Check it for cat shit?”
Before the several shocked looks could register on him, he was gone. He continued his serpentine walk down that last aisle, still not finding what he was searching for. As he walked blindly around the corner of that last aisle, he heard a crunch under his left foot. He picked up the broken plastic pieces and put them together in his hands. Looks like the hood of a model car, he thought. “Wonder if this is from the grand prize winner.”
Elliott dropped the pieces and began a march back toward the Townsend green ribbon. As he rounded the corner of that aisle, he noticed a crowd around a display near the now-deserted Susie Townsend booth. He pushed to the front and stood before the newly dedicated shrine of science at Trumpet Elementary, the grand prizewinner. Large letters across the top proclaimed “Our Environment—A Critical Overview.” On the center billboard was a collage of glossy pictures clipped from expensive magazines depicting a broad range of “environmental horrors.” A picture of a garbage dump featured a plastic shopping bag blowing in an otherwise unsullied breeze and the caption “plastic packaging defiles our landfills.” Another photo showed brown water streaming out of a pipe into a mucky river with the caption “industry desecrates our rivers and streams.” A picture of a high-rise condominium complex was accompanied by “developers destroy our wetlands.”
Elliott stood motionless except for the heaving of his chest, which coincided, with the uncontrolled sounds of his labored breathing. He looked to the right and saw a blue ribbon for first prize in the eighth grade. Partially covering that was another ribbon, this one as white as the fur of the endangered harp seal pup. Its golden center proclaimed “Best of Fair.” By now, Melissa Macon had moved away from him at the request of Ms. Dobbs.
Elliott’s hand trembled as he reached for the evaluation sheets. The one on top was signed by S. Dobbs. Its comment section was filled with perfectly formed letters: “Environmental science studies the relationship between humans and the earth on which we reside. It relates to how we treat the earth and how we heed the cries of its inhabitants. In it, we consider our errors and how we can rehabilitate a planet all but destroyed in our reckless plunder of the very resources on which we depend. This excellent project embodies the very soul of those principles and should be a guide for those students who follow.”
“Can I help you, Mr. Townsend?” came the unheard question from Ms. Dobbs.
He looked up at the display and he saw process-control flow-charts for a state-of-the-art recycling plant. Blinking and refocusing, the flow charts became a picture of a nuclear power plant. He glanced to one side and saw a detailed energy analysis of the glass bottle cycle, which evolved, with his eye massage into a picture of an enormous tree half way between towering into the forest canopy and its final submission to the chain saw.
“Mr. Townsend, can I help you find you daughter’s exhibit? … Mr. Townsend! You appear to be lost, and we would like very much to help you locate young Ms. Townsend’s booth so we can finish taking our pictures here for the year book.” Ms. Dobbs took Elliott’s arm to move him away from the prize-winning display.
Elliott turned with a snap toward the voice. “What?”
“I said, we are trying to take some more pictures here and—”
Elliott looked down at the evaluation sheet in his hand. He slowly began to crumble it.
“Mr. Townsend, that is not your property!” Ms. Dobbs ripped half of it from his hand. “Now look what …”
“You bitch,” he said in a controlled voice.
The group went instantly silent as Elliott and Dobbs faced each other. Dobbs was the first to react. “If all you can do is—”
“Do you call this hype, science? Look at it, Dobbs!” His voice rose in frenzied swells. “It’s nothing but bullshit! Show me the science!”
“Look, Townsend, if—”
“This whole show is bullshit, Dobbs! My girl worked for months to compete with bullshit. Why didn’t you just call it a bullshit fair? You don’t know what science is!”
By now, Mr. Compton and two of the larger faculty had arrived. Martha and Luke also arrived with Susie. Their mouths gaped as three men hustled Elliott toward the door. Nearly the entire assemblage of the science fair convened around the scene. As the eruption reached its climax, every pair of eyes attended the small posse shuffling away from the grand prizewinner.
Melissa stood flanked by her mother on one side, holding her hand, and by her science teacher on her other side. Dobbs, however, played no part in the consolation. Her attention fixed on Elliott Townsend as he approached his final exit from Trumpet Elementary. She published compassion with her hands, one expressively encased in the other, and with the erectness of her body, stern but sensitive.
But her eyes told a different story. They gleamed with the grandeur of a full moon. They sparkled full, bright, and zealous. Her cheeks could not disobey the subtle commands of her eyes as they stretched upward delicately. Even her lips responded like the tide lifted by a distant moon. Ms. Dobbs experienced a euphoria that she skillfully concealed, but for her eyes. Her eyes revealed a story of triumph and vindication.
No one could read that message, however, because every eye was fixed on Elliott, every eye but his own. Just as Mr. Macon heroically opened the door, Elliott wrenched one arm free and swung about to face Dobbs. He alone looked into her eyes for an eternal moment. And her look penetrated him. His protest evaporated and an odor of defeat rose from him. His captors smelled victory and thrust their victim out. They slammed the door shut.
When Elliott finally returned home, he faced a sullen, silent front. He scanned the faces, busy with make work tasks, closed to him. Luke studied a book with artificial attention. Martha scrubbed sparkling china.
“Where’s Susie?” Elliott asked.
“In her room,” came the cold response from Luke as he rose to leave the living room. As he walked past his father, Elliott put his hand on his shoulder. “Snake,” he whispered. Luke twisted sideways, and Elliott’s hand grasped only air as Luke continued to his room and closed the door with a click.
Martha interrupted his silent stance. “We got a ride home with the Beldens.”
Elliott reached into his left pocket. “Oh. I have the keys here.”
“Lucky for us, Susie had a house key.”
“Yeah, I guess I better get the car,” Elliott said softly.
“That would be nice.”
Elliott approached Martha and touched her. “I’m sorry, Marty. I’m sorry.”
Without turning or even slowing her incessant scrubbing, she responded in a g
uttural tone, “Don’t you dare touch me. Don’t you ever touch me again.”
Elliott inhaled the vengeance and repelled. An Arctic blast buried his retreating hand as her toxin infected his body and capsized his spirit. He trembled at the finality of her passion. Without realizing how, he found himself standing outside Susie’s room. His hand knocked gently, received no response, then reached for the doorknob. Susie’s room was dimly lit by the darkening sky. A figure in dirty running shoes lay in a ball on the bed.
“Susie? … Susie? … I just …”
The figure rose halfway. “How …” she sobbed. “How could you do that?”
“I … I don’t know what to say, Susie. I’m—”
“Just get out of here! I don’t want to ever talk to you again!” She picked up something on her bed and threw it. It hit Elliott and fell to the floor. Susie rejoined her pillow. Elliott picked up her science-fair notebook.
In his hands he held the tear-stained results of her exhausting labor. The pages sang to him with the hours that he’d spent with his young protégé. Elliott recalled when he’d given the notebook to Susie and explained the importance of keeping a detailed account of her activity. He replayed that day and others as he fondled the notebook. Elliott dropped the book and his daughter’s career on the corner of the bed and left the room.
The next day, Elliott said he was way behind on a project at the Lab and spent the whole Sunday there. It became increasingly common for him to not return home until after the children had gone to bed. After a while, the Lab became his sanctuary, and he embraced it. His old family seemed to thrive in his absence. His work became increasingly exciting as he immersed himself more deeply into the projects. Year after year, he provided the Lab with a fertile imagination and boundless energy and enthusiasm. It provided him with a caring family, a responsive receptacle for his devotion.
* * *
Elliott sat on the bar stool, motionless except for the figures he traced in the soy sauce. Guinda now stood beside him, drawing him close, feeling the warm tears through her blouse. Neither said anything. Neither moved, save for the subtle motion of sobs beside her.
“That’s what happened in 2010,” he finally said.
“You had a mental breakdown. It happens a lot. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
Straightening up and pushing a sushi roll across his plate, he said, “It wasn’t a breakdown. It was a tantrum. I was thirty-four, had a Ph.D., was a respected member of the community with a wonderful family. I irrevocably disgraced myself and that family. And I’ve been running from that all my life.”
“You’ll feel better now, Ted, now that you’ve let it out. It can’t hurt you any more now that it’s outside.”
“If only that were true, Guinda. But the truth is, I’d give anything now for you not to know that about me. I could hide behind my Nobel Prize and all that before, but now you know who I really am. Now you’re like Susie and Luke and Martha, just another face I need to beg forgiveness from.”
“Why would you need forgiveness from me? I’m just …”
Elliott studied the soy sauce. Guinda studied Elliott.
Finally she said, “Did Susie really forsake science after that?”
“No. I guess even a raving lunatic of a father couldn’t snuff that fire out. She became a computer scientist and has been very successful designing advanced neural-networks.”
“She was able to look past her father’s limitations and measure you on a more enduring scale. How about Luke?”
“He followed in her footsteps, but he’s concentrating on the development of DNA-based computers at the University of Dayton. He’s on sabbatical in Japan right now.”
“So he, too, was able to pick out his father’s best qualities and not hold a single event against you. Are they close to you now?”
“No.”
“Well, it looks like you did a lot more right things than wrong things.”
“I think the biggest right thing I did was leaving them alone after the science fair. I shudder to think what might have happened if I’d influenced them more than I did.”
“You don’t give yourself much credit, Ted. You were probably the biggest influence in their lives. And it was during those important early years. Take it from me. My father was never around. I have absolutely no memory of him. Mom divorced him when I was real little, and I never saw him again after that.”
They and their refreshed Tecates moved to the living room after the sushi disappeared. A glass-wall exposure to the west dazzled him as he deposited the two beers on the glass coffee table. The sun shone a deep crimson as it descended toward its temporary extinction. It seemed to be suspended just outside for their pleasure alone in defiance of Kepler. The table cradled a thick glass top with deeply cut geometric patterns on its underside. The sun’s evening rays refracted their way through that maze of glass prisms, engulfing the room in a mosaic of glints and spectra. The light sought to analyze and expose every detail of those glass furrows, as if they were magnets drawing each photon into their mysterious web of angles by an invisible force and then dispatching it again in a direction prescribed by some timeless canon.
Elliott rotated one of the beer glasses and watched the display change. As he stood pondering the spectacle, Guinda walked in. “If that’s too bright for you, I can just draw the drapes.”
“No. Please don’t. Look how those patterns dance across the wall just by moving these things a little?” He performed a little show for Guinda with the colorful forms doing pirouettes around the walls and ceiling.
“That’s great! I didn’t know you were a performing artist, too,” Guinda giggled.
“I was a goat in our third-grade Christmas pageant. I butted Christine Beste and knocked her into the manger to show her my undying love.”
“I’ll bet she was impressed with that!”
“Yes, I guess impressed is one word,” Elliott continued. “She cut her lip and got blood all over the Christ child. But the worst part was that I had to take the manger home and have my dad fix it that night. And, of course, he asked all the right questions. That put a damper on my show biz career … until the next Christmas, anyway.”
“Did you get into more trouble then?”
“No. The next year I played a bale of straw, and Christine decided to sit that one out, so the whole thing was pretty forgettable.”
“Suppose we sit on the deck instead of in here, Ted.”
After arranging themselves on the glider at one end of the redwood deck overlooking the manicured courtyard below, Elliott said, “You never said much about growing up in Missouri. Did you live in the city? You know, I’m from Missouri, too. I’m a little curious about what it was like there a couple of generations after I left.”
“I guess you could call me a city girl, maybe suburban is a better way to put it. I grew up in a little town but it was all surrounded by other towns, which were also surrounded by other towns. A few of the towns even had downtowns. You could tell when you were downtown because there was usually an old church or an old town hall in among the Holo-Wars and the Century Plazas. In some towns, they’d just have a rock with a brass plate to tell you where the town hall used to be. That way you had more room for the Psych Riders and Virtual Beats and things.
“When you drove around, you’d never know what town you were in except for the sign that would say Ginkgo Heights, Home of Virgin. And then you’d pass another sign that would say Terman, Home of Rod Thumper. I’ve always been proud of coming from the hometown of Long Comma Dick and Extortia. They’re pretty famous, probably end up in Congress.”
“Did you have a favorite hangout?”
Guinda adjusted her long, golden legs across the wicker table top in front of them. Her shorts stretched upward as she sank deeper into the cushion, but no tan line appeared. “Sure, we used to hang out at the Fairway Center a lot. Our favorite place was O’Doul’s Deli. They had this Grindello Special, and if you were good friends of whoever was working the
re, you could count on an extra dill pickle and a free bag of chips. The owner knew about the freebies, but she didn’t mind.
“She had this big TV in the back room where we used to watch political game shows and talk shows and soaps; and when we’d go home, Mother would have the same things on TV. She said I was really lucky to be surrounded by so many solid, public-spirited influences all those years. When she was a kid, most of the shows were still the old-time ones before they started putting the public figures on them. When she was in high school, she took this course in contemporary women’s issues, and one of her assignments was to demonstrate at the state capitol for that new law that required that at least half of the TV shows feature public figures.
“She told stories about the women’s movement after the turn of the century. She said women were just beginning to appreciate their sexual powers as a strong political force and if women didn’t get into politics when they were young and sexy, they were missing a real opportunity.”
“Is that what you’re trying to do, Guin?”
“Well, I guess that’s been in the back of my mind for a long time now. I’ve kept my body in pretty good shape, and I’ve got some Olympic medals, but I’m 26 now, and it won’t be too long before my breasts start drooping and my nipples get mushy,” she said matter-of-factly, “and then I won’t be worth much in politics.”
“Do you think your breasts are your greatest assets?”
“Sure! Don’t you?”
“Well Guin, I’ll have to admit that your body is pretty exciting.” The blush rose on his face, overcoming the evening shadows. “But it’s not your greatest asset. You’re so much more than an exciting body.”
“Then what is,” she asked, sitting up straight and taking his wrinkled, hairy hand between her soft, smooth hands. “I’d really like to know what your opinion is, Ted.”