The Altruists

by Andrew Ridker

  Mondays he had one lecture, plus office hours. The lecture was for his advanced section, MECH ENG 400: Special Topics: Computational Forensics and Failure Analysis. The upperclassmen-only course was intended, according to Arthur’s catalog copy, to introduce students to

  the finite element method,

  accident investigation,

  fractography/fractured components,

  computational fracture mechanics, and

  the role of ethics in failure analysis.

  He could’ve done the lecture blindfolded. Hands-free. This was familiar territory. It helped that 400-level engineering majors were the easiest students to teach, timid kids, seen-but-not-heard types, attentive seniors schooled in high-level fluid mechanics who had not solved the simple math of their virginities. Back from spring break, they remained conspicuously untanned.

  He was leading the class through a case study in which a carbon steel pipe carrying raw gas has malfunctioned, causing a disruption in a supply chain. “Or,” said Arthur, “if it helps to raise the stakes, think of the gas as poisonous. Toxic. And it’s your job to figure out why the pipe broke. Not to fix the pipe, or design a better pipe. No. To simply understand why it broke.” He walked them through their options. He suggested visual testing, penetrant testing, magnetic particle testing, and microstructural analysis. He floated the possibility that, in the light of what the tests revealed, the leak might be attributed to, say, a crack, most likely longitudinal, in the pipe. And that this fissure might be growing in size.

  An arm extended upward from the auditorium seating.

  “Yes?” said Arthur.

  The arm lowered. From where he stood, Arthur couldn’t make out whom it belonged to. One of his anonymous virgins. “I have a question.”

  He knew what the question was. Someone posed it every year. The predictability was a comfort to him. He could not envision a future in which he wasn’t annually asked this idiotic question.

  “Hit me.”

  “How would the, um, fracture—how would it get bigger by itself?”

  “Think about it. You’ve got a crack in the pipe. And you’ve got the jet momentum of the gas still flowing through.”

  “Right . . .”

  “The pressure of the gas pumping through the fissure increases the size of the fissure itself. Allowing more gas through, which means more pressure, which means an even larger break.”

  “So the gas pressure and the fracture—”

  “They feed off each other. The pipe breaks down because of their cooperation.”

  “The pipe breaks itself.”

  “In a sense, yes. Exactly.”

  After class he stepped out onto the ripening quad, mentally preparing some remarks to deliver to his children before they left. He crossed the campus to his office, pausing to admire the lotioned legs of a passing freshman clique. “Woof,” he said, and wiped his forehead.

  Arthur’s office was situated in Cornell Haynes Hall on Main Campus. Haynes was in the middle of renovations as part of Danforth’s “Leap Forward” campaign, a multimillion-dollar endeavor aimed at gutting some of the university’s older structures; a Damoclean crane loomed over the building. As Arthur approached he noticed Dean Gupta standing by the double doors, wielding his umbrella like a royal scepter. Arthur pivoted, ducking behind a bicycle rack. He stayed in a crouch, inching along a row of shrubs and entering the building through the rear. He walked the long, circuitous route to his office, thwarted by the roped-off passageways and stairwells that were still under construction.

  Arthur’s officemate was a gender studies adjunct with a septum piercing. But the adjunct was nowhere to be found, and Arthur had the place to himself. He sat at his desk and woke the monitor in front of him with a slap to its side. Shafts of noirish light cut through the blinds behind him, casting bars across the screen. Cocking his head left, then right, he began to type.

  A man in crisis, Arthur typed, is compelled to act. He must do what he can to protect himself, and his family. He cannot hesitate. It is with this incontrovertible fact in mind that I will ask you

  He deleted what he’d written. The cursor winked.

  A man in crisis is compelled to act. He must do everything in his power to protect his family, for as a man it is his responsibility to

  Again he deleted the text.

  What is a home? A home is a place

  It wasn’t working.

  Webster’s defines “home” as

  Arthur could lecture a class of a hundred students—why not his children? Say it, he thought. Say what you mean. He tried once more:

  A man in crisis must act

  A man in crisis

  A man in crisis

  Faced with a crisis, a man

  mh;lkd

  bkdjgh34i

  as;lk fhpiu

  As you know, houses cost money

  Let’s talk about the mortgage

  I’m coming to you asking

  I come to you in need

  As a man in crisis

  I need your help

  Only with your support

  I’m coming to you asking

  In a time of need

  The thing about a man in crisis is

  A man in crisis is

  A man in crisis is

  A man

  Arthur punched the keyboard, cursing under his breath. It was one thing to know what he wanted. It was much more difficult asking for it.

  * * *

  • • •

  Ethan dressed and walked to campus, hoping to get one last look before he left. He climbed the tiered stone steps and crossed beneath the towering archway of the admissions center, emerging onto manicured Main Campus, the lime-green turf sectioned by three redbrick walkways. Ethan took the center path, which guided him to the Seidel Library. Danforth was prettier, more welcoming, and altogether more habitable than he’d remembered. The school had changed—or Ethan had. Farther up the path, someone had affixed a huge bouquet of heart-shaped balloons to a sign outside the Schlafly Chapel. He made his way to investigate.

  The doors to the chapel were shut, but unlocked. Ethan stepped cautiously inside.

  The chapel was packed, wall to wall, pew upon pew. The sheer density on the ground was astounding—never in his four years as an undergrad had Ethan seen the room so full, not when an ex-president’s daughter came to campus, not when the Russian chess grand master spoke there, not when the Jewish magic realist read from his second novel—but the walls were high and grand. The chapel was characterized by a deliberate and mysterious emptiness. A young man’s voice floated through the vacuum.

  “. . . People will feed you all kinds of lines,” the voice said. Ethan, at the back of the chapel, standing beside other latecomers in the overflow, couldn’t see its source. “‘You are not your past.’ ‘Don’t let your suffering define you.’ What they are saying—what they mean—is that you should move on. Get over it. And hey, I understand that. No one wants to relive all that stuff forever. Betrayal. Addiction. Body-shaming. Who would want to be defined by that? Who wouldn’t want to overcome it?”

  A murmur throughout the chapel.

  “. . . But what I’m here to say is this: Why not let it define you? Why cover up the past? See, it’s as simple as this—and I know that it’s an unpopular opinion: But what if our traumatic experiences do impact us? More than anything else? What if we really are the things we’ve suffered through?”

  “Brilliant,” the girl next to Ethan whispered.

  “Who is he?”

  She flashed Ethan a judgmental look that withered as she registered his broken nose. “Um,” she said, turning away. “He used to go here. Now he’s rich.”

  “I’ll tell you a little story about myself,” said the voice. “I wasn’
t the most popular kid in high school. I know, I know—hard to believe, right? That the comp-sci geek had trouble getting dates to the prom?” Ripples of laughter. “I didn’t have a lot of friends. I certainly didn’t have a girlfriend. You might say I was bullied. I’ll spare you the details, but it wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t particularly unique either. The usual high school stuff. I didn’t have the most creative bullies, but then again, bullies aren’t known to be creatives.” More laughter. “But there I was, confused, awkward, and certain things would never improve. I had to watch my back in the hallways. I ate in empty classrooms to avoid being teased at lunch. There’s simply no other word for what I was: a victim.

  “For years I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened. When I matriculated at this same institution, I was practically bursting with joy. I could start again. No one would know me, or what I’d been through. But sometimes our pasts follow us. I couldn’t have predicted that a certain someone, not my high school bully but a member of his friend group, his social network, was also a matriculating freshman . . .”

  Ethan looked around him. The room was rapt. Quiet save for the creaking of the pews and the confident, practiced voice delivering the speech. Sunlight poured in, colored by the stained glass, swaths of blue and red and yellow crowning the heads of the audience.

  “. . . I was left to make a tough decision. Spend four years in hiding, avoiding this kid from my high school? Reinvent myself beyond recognition? And then it hit me. I didn’t have to hide. I didn’t have to change. I could be me. Regular old me. The geek. The victim. Why not own my trauma? As I started to make friends, I learned quickly that I wasn’t the only one. Like, after all, gravitates to like, and soon I found myself trading stories of high school terror back and forth with my hallmates and study groups. We bonded over them. I remember late nights in Seidel, fighting it out over who’d had it worst. It was great. It was a relief. But it wasn’t until my junior year, in Mobile App Development, that I realized: all this suffering, all this data, could be put to use . . .”

  Ethan stepped outside into the sun. He closed his eyes and let it warm his face. When he opened them, he saw his father scrambling across the quad. Ethan raised his arm and thought to call out to him, but didn’t. He thought of his mother. He’d inherited from Francine a weakness for men who couldn’t love him back. As he watched his father hurry across campus at the same embarrassed velocity at which Charlie had left him, not once now but twice, he stopped to wonder why it was that he wanted only what he couldn’t have, while all around him a million unseen insects shuttled pollen to the ready stigmas of expensive flowers.

  NINETEEN

  A man in crisis,” Arthur began, “is compelled to act.”

  The Alters had congregated in the living room. The unfortunate irony of this particular part of the house was that it was so tied to death. It was here that Arthur and Francine broke the news of Arthur’s mother (stroke), Francine’s great-uncle (heart attack), the white-haired Survivor who’d lived next door to them in Jamaica Plain (natural causes, Parkinson’s-accelerated). It was here that Francine delicately explained the suicide of her close friend and former college roommate, who’d been living far away in Marin County with six guinea pigs and bipolar disorder. And it was here, the couch on which Ethan and Maggie sat awaiting their father’s presumably bad news with Pavlovian apprehension, where Francine had squeezed Arthur’s hand until it paled, explaining to the kids her diagnosis. “And when that crisis threatens his family,” he continued, “he cannot hesitate—”

  “Hey, Dad?” said Ethan.

  Arthur paused.

  “Before you go on . . .”

  “What?”

  “I wanted to say. Before you go on with your—before you get to whatever it is you’re getting to . . . I wanted to say, thanks for having us.”

  “Th—oh. Okay. Well, yes. Good. You’re welcome.”

  “I mean it,” Ethan said. “I wasn’t sure about this. But it was nice. To be home.”

  “Even with . . .” Arthur drew a circle in the air around his nose.

  “Even with that.”

  Maggie looked up. “Seconded.”

  “You too?” said Arthur.

  “Yeah. I don’t know. I like being back. Seeing the city and everything. Last night, something in me just . . . I haven’t had frozen custard in, I think, a decade. You used to take us all the time.”

  “I did.” Arthur felt his insides quiver.

  “So, anyway. Thanks, I guess. Like Ethan said. It was a good weekend.”

  Well, fuck.

  He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t make the ask. Not now. The goal had been to win them over, but now that he had, he was paralyzed. He’d become accustomed to failure. Success confounded him. He squeezed the arm of the green wing chair where he sat. There they were. His children. They’d come back to St. Louis to see him. They were thanking him for it. He swelled with goodwill.

  He drew a long breath and exhaled slowly, his shoulders sinking as the air left his body.

  “You have no idea,” he said quietly. “You have no idea.”

  “No idea about what?” asked Ethan.

  Arthur shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.” He arched his back and laughed a small, private laugh. “You know,” he said, “I’m glad you came back too. You didn’t have to. You could’ve ignored my letter. Lots of kids would have done that. You didn’t owe me anything, you really didn’t.”

  “It’s all right, Dad,” Ethan said. “We were happy to.”

  “No, no. It’s important that I get this off my chest.” He felt drunk with gratitude, warm cheeked and loose tongued. “I’ve wanted to say this for a long time. Here goes: I don’t feel like I know either of you. Does that make sense? It pains me to admit it. But it’s true. I don’t know you. I bowed out of parenting at some point. I stopped paying attention.” He leaned back and crossed one leg over the other, nodding to himself. “See, the problem was, once I’d bowed out, I felt—I didn’t know how to bring myself back. The longer I waited, the harder it was to get involved again. I felt like I’d already missed my chance. That’s what it was. A feeling of having missed out. I couldn’t start to know you because it was too late. I never stopped feeling that way. And the problem, when it’s always too late, is that it’s always too late, and getting later.”

  “This is nice of you, Dad,” said Maggie, “but we’re okay. We don’t need—”

  “Let me finish . . . let me finish.” He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his thighs. There was so much left to say. “For years,” he continued, “for years I felt like I lived with strangers. People I didn’t know. I hid. Retreated! It may have seemed like I was absentminded, out of the loop, but make no mistake. I knew what I was doing—and what I was not. I was not parenting. I hid in my office, not working. I hid in libraries, not reading. The long middle of my life was spent not-doing. Avoiding you both. My adulthood was defined by all the things I did not.”

  “We’d rather not hear—”

  “What I’m saying is, I failed. I have been needy, reckless, and vain. I have been neglectful and self-centered. And I’m ready. I’m ready to acknowledge that now. What a relief! I can’t even tell you. It amazes me, honestly, to think of how I acted. But I suppose it takes a moment of reckoning like this. Because before, there was always something to fall back on. There was always a safety net. When I ran out of ambition I had my job. When my career stalled I had your mother. When I lost your mother I had you. When I lost you I had the house . . . Now, without the house I’ll have nothing.”

  “Without the house?” asked Ethan.

  “Yes,” said Arthur. “Yes. This is what it’s all about. This is why you’re here. Listen—I’m sorry to tell you, but we are going to lose the house.”

  “Wait,” said Ethan. “What happened?”

  Arthur shrugged. “Can’t afford it.
”

  “So what, then?” Maggie said. “We pack up? Is that what happens next?”

  “The funny thing is,” Arthur said, quietly enough to be heard, “I was going to try to save it.”

  “Save it? How?”

  Arthur smiled. “Maggie. Ethan. I am so looking forward to getting to know you.”

  “Why is he talking like this?” Maggie whispered to her brother.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s funny,” Arthur said, again quietly. “I had this whole idea. This plan . . .”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “Let’s just say I could have ended this weekend on a different note.”

  “Dad.” Ethan cocked his head. “I don’t think either of us knows what you’re getting at.”

  “It’s nothing. It’s nothing . . . You know, I really spared you a good amount of discomfort.”

  Maggie shut her eyes. “Explain yourself, please.”

  “I was going to sit you down,” he said, “right here, and ask you to save the house for me.”

  “Save it how?” said Maggie.

  “I was going to ask,” laughed Arthur, “for your help in buying back the house. Hell, I had a speech!” He dug into his pocket and removed a folded piece of paper. “But now—now I see how foolish that would have been. Now that I have you here, talking to me, I realize there’s no point. This, right here, is what’s important. I’ll figure it out, I’ll find a place to live. You don’t have to worry about me.” He returned the speech to his pocket.