How to Live Safely in a Science Fictiona (2010) (20 page)

Hitting the peak of your life’s trajectory is not the painful part. The painful day comes earlier, comes before things start going downhill, comes when things are still good, still pretty good, still just fine. It comes when you think you are still on your way up, but you can feel that the velocity isn’t there anymore, the push behind you is gone, it’s all inertia from here, it’s all coasting, it’s all momentum, and there will be more, there will be higher days, but for the first time, it’s in sight. The top. The best day of your life. There it is. Not as high as you thought it was going to be, and earlier in your life, and also closer to where you are now, startling in its closeness. That there’s a ceiling to this, there’s a cap, there’s a best-case scenario and you are living it right now. To see that look in your parents’ faces at the dinner table at ten, and not recognize it, then to see it again at eighteen and recognize it as something to recognize, and then to see it at twenty-five and to recognize it for what it is.

The worst part of the drive back from the park was not that we didn’t talk, that would have been okay, fine, that would have been better than what happened, which was my father pretending to be happy. He turned on the radio, he asked what song I wanted to listen to, he asked me about the song on the radio, he even tried, and this is the worst part, to sing along. I knew what was happening, but he kept it up for long enough and was singing and smiling all crazy enough that I wondered if he’d burst some pipe in his head, if the pressure and force of the crushing blow had damaged his own emotional machinery.

There’s my dad, pretending to be okay, pretending he isn’t reeling, hasn’t just had the wind and life and fight knocked out of him, hasn’t just had something inside of him, the last bit of anything delicate inside, smashed into a couple hundred tiny pieces.

I see myself staring straight ahead at the road, trying hard not to look over at my father, already replaying the events in my head.

“So,” the director had said, “only one thing left to do. Fire it up.”

My dad and I look at each other. As agreed, he’s the one to get in. He takes off his suit jacket, hands it to me, and I lay it over my arm, hoping to impart some ceremony to the moment. My father has on short sleeves under his jacket, and if the director thinks it odd, he doesn’t show it. Dad looks small in there, his shoulders a little slumped. He nods and I close the hatch.

I am watching my self thinking,
We should have stayed in our garage
. I am watching him think that and I am thinking it myself now. Why couldn’t we have just stayed in there, in our laboratory, our space. We should have stayed where we were safe. Maybe things would have been different, maybe the thing would have worked, the piece of junk, maybe I wouldn’t have had to watch my father sweat and strain and stand there awkwardly, trying everything for what is probably eight, ten minutes but feels like my entire life. It is, it was, it has been my entire life, my father’s life, too, those few eternal unending merciless minutes dragging and stretching on in silence, the director ever the gentleman, unwaveringly polite, which makes it worse, polite until the end, the etiquette of a situation like this unclear to me and to him, as we stand there for the awful duration of this stretch of time on what was supposed to have been the best, brightest-shining hour of my father’s story, through the first phase of let me try this, it must be that, simple fix, to the heh heh, that’s funny, this never happens in our lab (me knowing, and hoping the director doesn’t know, even as we are failing, hoping that the director at least can’t imagine what my father means when he says “our lab,” our messy garage in our messy house, with our scribblings everywhere, our workshop with the random objects everywhere, a basketball, an old yearbook of mine, a rusted fork sitting on top of a tray full of assorted screws and nails and bolts, bad tools, bent and tired, decade-old oil stains under our LTD wagon, the cat’s litter box stinking the whole place up), then on to the stage of oh what were we thinking that we could pull off something like this, the stage of self-questioning, asking me, Hey son, do you remember if I checked this or that, a stalling tactic, a misdirection, of me realizing then how good a man my father was and is, how, even in his worst moment, he would never, ever, in a million years blame me for something, even if it was my fault, not like this, not in front of this stranger, even if it was my fault, and who knows, it probably was, I wasn’t half the scientist my father is or was, I never could have been, of me realizing my father would have never even thought about trying to pin it on me, though he could have, it would have been easy enough, and I wish I could freeze time right then and there forever, wish I could hold that knowledge forever, the realization that, even in the gut-turningly horrible awkwardness of that situation, the absolute low of all lows, in the most desperate minute of this hour of his greatest embarrassment and unexplained bad luck and, yes, failure, even though he could be absent and fuzzy and unlocatable and clench his jaw at me and always be disappointed in me and use silence as a form of cruelty to me and my mother, despite all of that, my father would always protect me against the world, would always stand between the world and me, would always be a buffer, a protective covering, a box for me to hide in.

And then finally comes the last stage, we can almost go home now, in the hot car and then the cold garage and the even colder house, can almost go back into our box and hide, but not before a couple more minutes of head-scratching, my father actually standing there scratching his head with his hand, his small hand, strong and with well-defined veins, but still small, how the smallness of his hand, of his entire height just hit me, the image of him looking like an immigrant, like a bewildered new graduate student in front of the eminent professor, a small man with a small hand in a large foreign country, not so much scratching his head as just pushing his hand up against it, as in, Oh what’s happened, oh why now, why like this, betrayed by his own invention, the anguished embarrassment made that much worse by all of his soliloquy, by all of his grandstanding theoretical monologue that preceded it, and worst of all, because he has just finished explaining how his machine is an idea, is a device of the mind, this failing not being just a fluke, not just a piece of bad mechanical luck, but an actual failure of his own mind, his own concept. The silence is just unbearable now, and to make things worse, now kids are starting to appear at the edges of the diamond, parents pulling up with coolers, bags of bats, the slapping of mitts, the thwock of warm-up catch along the first-base line, people a little curious about what’s going on, feeling the eyes on us.

A father and son run out toward right field, the dad with a ball and glove and the boy with his slightly undersized bat, not the standard Little League aluminum bat that the other kids have, that sends a ringing noise through the air, but a wooden bat, a Louisville Slugger tee-ball bat. I see him now, holding that bat, trotting out along the chalk line behind his dad, a jaunty step, he’s proud of his dad, who looks like a real athlete, like he could have played two sports in college, he’s looking around to see if the other kids are looking at him, but he’s also a kid and he’s taking it in, looking at the grass, squinting up at the sun, at the sky, stunned by the fullness of the day. Trying to absorb it all, hoping maybe time will stop right this instant, forever, and never start again. That this will be it, right here, on this field, that’s all. I see myself at seventeen, already feeling nostalgia for being a kid his age, feeling the weight of all the bright Saturdays I spent in the dank garage instead of in this bath of sunlight and heat and blue and green, embarrassed for how little I had lived, how little my father had lived, wondering if it was something I would pass on to my son. This was the big day for my dad and I had woken up that morning amazed at the rarity of a day like today, when we might come home champs, when we (my dad, me, our family) might get a win for once, but now, standing here looking at all of this, I remember how stupid I felt as I realized that for most of these kids, a day like this happened every weekend, that none of these kids thought of life that way, as a series of mostly bummer days with the occasional chance at getting a win
against life
. Who thinks that way? I was seventeen. Who thinks that way at seventeen?

They set up about fifty feet away from each other, two endpoints of a little father–son axis, and the dad began lobbing slow overhand pitches to his son, and the boy would swing at them, hitting about one out of every six or seven, weak little grounders that dribbled back to his dad, that his dad would run up to and field as if they were hard hit, which made his son feel a little better, but also a lot worse. The kid was small, and I had been a small kid, and I remember what it was like. He looked like he was getting frustrated. He didn’t have any bat speed, even for a kid his age. The bat was probably about three ounces too heavy.

But then, after about three dozen pitches and four or five dinky glancing hits, the kid got ahold of one. The sound it made. It was a perfect sound. Crack. Clean off the sweet spot. Even as he was hitting it, I don’t think he believed it was happening. I remember thinking how much I wanted that to be my father–son axis, how bad I wanted to be the one hitting that ball.

The kid’s dad whipped his head around, as did all of the other kids, and their dads, and even the director. Everyone stopped and turned and watched the ball fly over his dad’s head and then over the grass of the adjoining field, and then over the infield, and land, right on home plate of the other diamond. The kid had arms like wet noodles, didn’t even really have shoulders yet. It had to have been 250 feet. I saw it happen and I’m seeing it again now and I still don’t believe it happened.

The only person who hadn’t watched it was my dad. I didn’t know that then, but now, I see that. He just stands there, looking at our sad prototype, holding a vacuum tube in one hand and his other hand on his head, and looking like he knows it just slipped away. The director turns back from watching the kid, which was just the break he needed to stop my dad’s awkward fumbling with the machine. There was a mumbled half apology about needing to get back to the office for a meeting, and a promise of perhaps continuing this at a later date which I now see as a courteous refusal of the director to acknowledge what had happened, but even then I knew, given me, given our family, that this was it, that there wouldn’t be another chance, that this was the high point of our arc and from here, we were heading into unknown territory.

The fallout started the next morning. It must have taken a night for it to process, a few hours spent alone, stewing over it, replaying the memory over and over in his head, asking what if. It must have taken that time for the damage to register on his ego, on his shell, on his sense of purpose and navigation, on his physical body, even. He didn’t get out of bed until ten, which was very late for him, about four and a half hours late for a Sunday morning, and when I saw him he looked sore, like he’d aged years in one night. My mother went to temple early and I was left in the house to wonder when he would get up and what it would be like when he did. He went into the bathroom and after a long shower and a long period of silence before and after, he emerged from there and walked into the kitchen just after noon. He didn’t look at me, didn’t ask where Mom was. We sat and ate noodles that she had cooked and left on the stove. He heated his up and then picked at them looking mildly repulsed. I asked him if he wanted me to heat up some soup. He didn’t answer. After he ate, he put his plate in the sink and I heard him go down into the garage and I was thinking, just for a second, what if, and I was about to go join him when I heard the garage open and his car rumble out the driveway. He didn’t come back until after I’d gone to sleep that night, and the next day, he went to work and we never talked about that day again.

(module δ)

from
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

conjectures, currently unproven but believed to be true

That a moment has a thickness to it, a size.

That a moment is measurable. That there will be a finite number of moments in the history of the universe.

That there is no unique global time.

That chronodiegetics is a theory of the past tense, a theory of regret. That it is fundamentally a theory of limitations.

TAMMY makes a face at me I haven’t seen before.

“What is that?” I say.

“I don’t know. Your dad, I don’t know.”

“More complicated than I remember. Whatever. Let’s keep moving.”

“What are you even going to say? If you find him, what will you say?”

After the day at the park, the drifting got worse. It had started years earlier, when I was in seventh grade, or maybe it was the summer before seventh grade, at first just a few seconds at a time, hard to say if my mother even noticed, but before long it was impossible not to notice. By the time I entered high school, my father was regularly drifting five minutes into the past, and when he did that, none of us could talk to him. Well, we could, but he’d never hear us. He would say things to us, transmit the words into the viscous medium of our kitchen, and we wouldn’t get the message right away, it took a while for the words and sound to reach us through the light and air thick with delay, with silence and tension, the air resistant to communication and understanding. And then we would answer, but he was already gone, had already moved on, out, away from us. We would try to answer, make meaning from these conversations, these bits of days, these bits of daily life being all we had by then, my mother and I, all we had left with him. We were losing him.