“I am honored to be here for your birth of understanding. Where I am, the minds are past their early enthusiasms. I miss seeing the glint in eyes. I miss the paintbrush in my hand and the smell of paints. If you wish to show me this microscope we can go there now. The sea is very old. We don’t have to stay beside it all day.”
It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive to Berkeley. They drove along the western ridge of the Cascade Range, within a sea breeze of the Mendocino Fracture Zone. Beside the Russian River. They drove to Mendocino, then Littleriver, then Albion. At Albion they cut off onto Highway 128 and drove along the Navarro River to Cloverdale. They went by Santa Rosa, then Petaluma, then Novato, and down and across the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge and on to Berkeley.
It was six o’clock when they arrived at the campus. It was dark and the last students were mounting their bicycles as they left the biochemistry building. Nieman nosed the Jeep into a faculty parking space and they got out and entered the building through iron doors and went down a hall to an elevator.
“Have you been on one of these?” Nieman asked, holding the elevator door with his hand. “It’s a box on a pulley, actually. It’s quite safe. When they were new sometimes they would get stuck. Some pretty funny jokes and stories came out of that. Also, there were tragedies, lack of oxygen and so forth. This one is thirty years old at least, but it’s safe.”
“Arabic,” Leonardo said, touching the numbered buttons with his finger. “I thought it would continue to be useful.”
“The numbers? Oh, yes. Everyone uses the same system. Based on the fingers and toes. Five fingers on each hand. Two arms, two legs. Binary system and digital system. We run our computers on the binary system. It’s fascinating. What man has done. There’s one playwright dealing with it, a man named Stoppard.” Leonardo stepped back and stood near Nieman. Nieman pressed 2 and the box rose in space on its pulley and the door opened.
Waiting for them on the second-floor hall was the head of university security. He was wearing a blue uniform with silver buttons. “Hello,” he said. “If you’re Mr. Gluuk they have a lady waiting for you. President Culver said to tell you she’d show you the machines.”
“Oh, that wasn’t necessary. We only wanted to look at them.” He took Leonardo’s arm. So he looks like a genius who has spent a thousand years on a Buddhist prayer bench. So the smile is so dazzling it hypnotizes people. No one would imagine this. No one would believe it.
“Don’t I know you from when I was a student?” Nieman asked. “I’m Nieman Gluuk. I used to edit the school paper. In the seventies. Didn’t you guard the building when we had the riots in seventy-five?”
“I thought I knew you. I’m Abel Kennedy. I was a rookie that year and you kept me supplied with cookies and coffee in the newspaper office. I’m head of security now.” Captain Kennedy held out his hand and Nieman shook it. He was trying to decide how to introduce Leonardo when a door opened down the hall and a woman came walking toward them. She was of medium height with short blonde hair. She was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt. Over the shirt was a long white vest. There were pencils and pens in the pockets of the vest. A pair of horn-rimmed glasses was on her head. Another pair was in her hand.
“I was wondering if one could wear bifocals to look into the scope,” Nieman said. “I was afraid I’d have to get contact lenses to study science.”
“It’s a screen.” She laughed. “I’m Stella Light. My parents were with the Merry Pranksters. Some joke. I meant to have it changed but I never did.” She held out her hand to Nieman. Long slender fingers. Nails bitten off to the quick. No rings. She smiled again.
“I’m Nieman Gluuk. This is our distinguished guest, Leo Gluuk, a cousin from Madrid. I mean, Florence. Also from Minneapolis.”
“Make up your mind. Nice to meet you. I’ve read your stuff. I’m from Western Oregon. Well, what exactly can we do for you?”
“Just let us see the microscopes. Leo is very interested in the technology. It’s extremely nice of you to stay late like this. I know your days are long enough already.”
“I was here anyway. We’ve had an outbreak of salmonella in the valley. We’re trying to help out with that. It gets on the chicken skin in the packing plants or if they are defrosted incorrectly. Well, I’ll let you see slides of that. They’re fresh.”
They walked down a hall to a room with the door ajar. Inside, on a long curved table, was the console. In the center, covered with a metal that looked more like gold than brass, was the scanning electron microscope. The pride of the Berkeley labs.
They moved into the open doorway. Leonardo had been completely quiet. Now he gave Stella the smile and she stepped back and let him precede her into the room. She and Leonardo sat down at the console. She got out a box of slides and lifted one from the box with a set of calipers. She slid it into a notch and locked it down. Then she pushed a button and an image appeared on the screen. “To 0.2 nanometers,” she said. “We can photograph it and go higher.”
Nieman leaned over their shoulders and looked into the screen. It was a range of hills covered with cocoons. “A World War I battlefield,” he said. “Corpses strewn everywhere. Is that the salmonella?”
“Yes. Let’s enlarge it.” She pushed another button. The hill turned into crystal mountains. Now it was the Himalayas. Range after range of crystals. Nieman looked down at his own arm. In a nanometer of skin was all that wonder.
Leonardo began asking questions about the machine, about the metal of which it was made, about the vacuum through which the electrons traveled, how the image was created. Stella answered the questions as well as she could. She bent over him. She put pieces of paper in front of him. She put slides into the microscope. She asked no questions. She had been completely mesmerized by the smile. She would remember nothing of the encounter. Except a momentary excitement when she was alone in the room at night. She thought it was sexual. She thought it was about Nieman. There I go, she would scold herself, getting interested in yet another man I cannot understand. The daddy track, chugging on down the line to lonesome valley.
They stayed in the laboratory for half an hour. Then they wandered out into the hall and found a second microscope and Stella took the thing apart and let Leonardo examine the parts. Then she let him reassemble it. She stood beside Nieman. She sized him up. He was better looking than his photograph in the paper. His skin was so white and clear. He was kind.
“You really quit your job?” she asked.
“A leave of absence. I was burned out.”
“Who is he?” she asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone I liked as much.”
“We all love him. The family adores him. But it’s hard to keep track of him. He travels all the time.”
Leonardo put everything back into its place. He laid Stella’s pencil on top of the stack of papers and got up from the chair. “We are finished now,” he said. “We should be leaving. We thank you for your kindness.”
Stella walked them to the elevator. They got on and she stood smiling after them. When they had left she went back into the laboratory and worked until after twelve. Two children had died in the salmonella outbreak. Twenty were hospitalized. The infected food had reached a grade school lunchroom.
When they left the building there was a full moon in the sky. There was so much light it cast shadows. Leonardo walked with Nieman to the Jeep. “I am leaving,” he said. “You will be fine.” He kissed Nieman on the cheek, then on the forehead. Then he was gone. Nieman tried to follow him but he did not know how. When he got back to the Jeep, the clothes Leonardo had been wearing were neatly stacked on the passenger seat. On top of the clothes was a pencil. A black and white striped pencil sharpened to a fine point. Nieman picked it up and held it. He put it in his pocket. I might write with this, he decided. Or I might draw.
He got into his Jeep and drove over to Nora Jane and Freddy Harwood’s house and parked in the driveway and walked up on the porch and rang the doorbell. The twins
let him in. They pulled him into the room. “Momma’s making étouffée and listening to the Nevilles,” Tammili told him. “She’s having a New Orleans day. Come on in. Stay and eat dinner with us. Daddy said you’d been in Willits. How is it there? Was it snowing?”
They dragged him into the house. From the back Freddy called out to him. Nora Jane emerged from the kitchen wearing an apron. It was already beginning to fade. Whatever had happened or almost happened or seemed to happen was fading like a photograph in acid.
“Come on in here,” Freddy was calling out. “Come tell us what you were doing. We have things to tell you. Tammili made all-stars in basketball. Lydia got a role in the school play. Nora Jane got an A on her first English test. I think I’m going bald. We haven’t seen you in days. Hurry up, Nieman. I want to talk to you.”
“He’s your best friend,” Lydia giggled, half whispering. “It’s so great. You just love each other.”
The Brown Cape
Tammili and Lydia were supposed to be cleaning up the loft. Their father was working on the well. Their mother was cooking breakfast and it was their job to make the beds and straighten up the loft and clean the windows with vinegar and water.
“Why can’t we clean them with Windex like we do at home?” Lydia complained. “Just because we come to Willits for spring vacation they go environmental and we have to use vinegar for the windows. The windows are okay. I’m not cleaning them.”
“You shouldn’t have come then. You could have stayed with Grandmother. You didn’t have to come if you’re just going to complain.”
“Why can’t we have a ski lodge or something? Why do we have to have a solar house? We can’t bring anybody. It’s too little to even bring the dogs.”
“It’s a solar-powered house, not a solar house, and I don’t want to take dogs everywhere I go. There’re wolves and panthers in these woods. Those dogs wouldn’t last a week up here. Dooley is so friendly he’d let a wolf carry him off in his teeth.”
“You clean the windows and I’ll get all this stuff out from under the bed. Everyone’s always sticking stuff under here. I hate piles of junk like this.” Lydia was pulling boxes and clothes out from underneath the bed where she and Tammili had been sleeping. It was the bed on which they had been born, in the middle of the night, ten and a half years before. Their father had delivered them and a helicopter had come and taken them to a hospital at Fort Bragg. Sometimes Lydia felt sentimental about that and sometimes she didn’t like to think about it. It was embarrassing to have been delivered in a snowstorm by your father. Not to mention they had almost died. That was too terrible to think about.
“What are you thinking about?” Tammili asked, but she knew. She and Lydia always thought about things at the same time. It was the curse and blessing of being twins. You were never lonely, not even in your thoughts. On the other hand there was no place to hide.
“Who put this here?” Lydia dragged a long brown cloak out from underneath the bed. It had a cowl and a twisted cord for the waist and it was very thick, as thick as a blanket. It smelled heavenly, like some wonderful mixture of wildflowers and mist. She pulled it out and spread it on the bed. Then she wrapped it around her shoulders.
“I’ve never seen this before.” Tammili drew near the cape and touched it. “It smells like violet. I bet it belongs to Nieman. No one but Nieman would leave a cape here. Let me wear it too, will you?” She moved into one half of the cape. They wrapped it around themselves like a cocoon and fell down on the bed and started laughing.
“Once upon a time,” Lydia began, “there were two little girls and they were so poor they didn’t have any firewood for the fireplace. All the trees had been cut down by ruthless land developers and there weren’t any twigs left to gather to make a fire. They only had one thing left and that was their bed. We better cut up the bed and burn it, one of them said, or else we won’t live until the morning. We will freeze to death in this weather. Okay, the other one said. Pull that bed over here and let’s burn it up. Then they saw something under the bed. It was a long warm cape that their father had left for them when he went away to war. There was a note on it. ‘This is for my darling daughters in case they run out of firewood. Love, your dad.’”
“Tammili.” It was their mother calling. “You girls come on down. I want you to help me with the eggs.” Tammili and Lydia put their faces very close together. They giggled again, smothering the sound.
“We’re coming,” Lydia called. “We’ll be down in a minute.” They folded the cape and laid it on the bed by Tammili’s backpack. Then they climbed down the ladder to help their mother with the meal.
That was Wednesday morning. On Wednesday night their father decided they should go on an expedition. “To where?” their mother asked. “You know I have to study while I’m here. I can’t go off for days down a river or in the mountains. One-day trips. That’s all I’m good for this week.”
“I thought we might overnight up in the pass by Red River,” Freddy Harwood said. “Nieman and I used to camp there every spring. It might be cold but we’ll take the bedrolls and I’ll have the mobile phone. You can’t go for one night?”
“I should stay here. Do you need me?”
“We don’t need you,” Tammili said. “We can take care of things. I want to go, Dad. We’ve been hearing about Red River for years but no one ever takes us. We’re almost eleven. We can do anything.”
“Get another adult,” Nora Jane insisted. “Don’t go off with both of them and no one to help.”
“We are help,” Lydia said. “Is it a steep climb, Daddy? Is it steep?”
“No. It’s long but it’s not that steep. Nieman and I used to do the trail to the top in three hours. Two and a half coming down. There’s a bower up there under thousand-year-old pine trees. You don’t need a sleeping bag. We’ll take them but we could sleep on the ground. I haven’t been up there to camp in years. Not since I met your mother. So, we’ll go. It’s decided.”
“Tomorrow,” they both screamed.
“Maybe tomorrow. Maybe Friday. Let me think about it.” They jumped on top of him and started giving him one of their famous hug attacks. They grabbed pillows and hugged him with them until he screamed for mercy. “Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow,” they kept saying. “Don’t make us wait.”
“Then we have to get everything ready tonight because we have to leave at sunup. It takes an hour to drive to the trail. Then three hours to climb. I want to have camp set up by afternoon.”
“What do we need?”
“Tent, food, clothes, extra socks. Vaseline for blisters, ankle packs for sprains, snakebite kit, Mag Lites, sleeping bags.”
“We’re going to carry all that?”
“Whatever we want we have to carry. We’ll have extra water in the car. We’ll take small canteens and the purifying kit. Go start pumping at the well, Tammili. Fill two water bags.”
“Can’t I fill them at the sink?”
“No, the idea is to know how to survive without a sink. That’s what Willits is for, sweeties.”
“We know.” They gave each other a look. “So no matter what happens your DNA is safe.” They started giggling and their mother put down the dish she was drying and started giggling too.
Freddy Harwood was an equipment freak. He had spent the summers of his youth in wilderness camps in Montana and western Canada. When he graduated to camping on his own, he took up equipment as a cause. If he was going camping he had every state-of-the-art device that could be ordered on winter nights from catalogs. He had Mag Lites on headbands and Bull Frog sunblock. He had wrist compasses and Ray-Ban sunglasses and Power Bars and dehydrated food. He had two lightweight tents, a Stretch Dome and a Lookout. The Lookout was the lightest. It weighed five pounds, fifteen ounces with the poles. He had Patagonia synchilla blankets and official referee whistles and a Pur water purifier and drinking water tablets in case the purifier broke. He had two-bladed knives for the girls and a six-bladed knife for himself. He had stainless-ste
el pans and waterproofing spray and tent repair kits and first aid kits of every kind.
“Bring everything we think we need and put it on the table,” Freddy said. “Then we’ll decide what to take and what to leave. Bring everything. Your boots and the clothes you’re going to wear. It’s eight o’clock. We have to be packed and in bed by ten if we’re going in the morning.”
The girls went upstairs and picked out clothes to wear. “I’m taking this cape,” Tammili said. “I’ve got a feeling about this cape. I think it’s supposed to go to Red River with us.”
“Nieman saw baby panthers up there once,” Lydia added. “The mother didn’t kill him for looking at them she was so weak with hunger because there had been a drought and a forest fire. Nieman left them all his food. He got to within twenty feet of their burrow and put the food where she could get it. Dad was there. He knows it’s true. Nieman’s so cool. I wish he was going with us.”
“He has to study. He’s going for a Nobel prize in biochemistry. That’s what Dad told Grandmother. He said Nieman wouldn’t rest until he won a Nobel.”
The girls brought their clothes and backpacks down from the loft and spread the things out on the table. “What’s this?” Freddy asked, picking up the cloak.
“Something we found underneath the bed. We think it’s Nieman’s. I was going to take it instead of a sleeping bag. Look how warm it is.”
“I wouldn’t carry it if I were you. You have to think of every ounce.” Tammili went over and took the cape from him and folded it and laid it on the hearth. Later, when they had finished packing all three of the backpacks and set them by the kitchen door, she picked up the cape and pushed it into her pack. I’m taking it, she decided. I like it. It looks like the luckiest thing you could wear.
The Courts of Love Page 12