Origins of the Universe and What It All Means (2 page)

With the phone clamped between my shoulder and jaw, I repeated the list back to him.

He added a few more items, then proceeded to describe in utmost detail where each object could be found inside his house.

“I know where it all is,” I said several times, and “Yes, of course I know that too.” His house is just five doors down from mine and I know the layout quite well. But he didn't stop no matter how many
I knows
I uttered, because once he gets going on a train of thought it's impossible for him to stop. Impossible.

After a while I doodled on the notepad, saying “uh-huh” every few seconds.

My father had gone to Irapuato, Mexico, at my urging. A few months earlier, my brother David and I had bought him a one-way ticket with the vague promise of a return flight at his convenience. We hoped that without a specific return date, he might be more inclined to stay longer than three weeks—perhaps forever. This isn't quite as harsh as it seems. For decades my dad has dreamed of moving there permanently, surrounded by the language and landscape he loves, the deserts and beaches and mountains where he gathered arachnid specimens for half a century. He also has extended family there: his deceased wife's family, and my brother David's family, including my sister-in-law Penny and their two young girls. He would be near lots of relatives who could look after him. Relatives other than me. Far, far away.

Among the things he requested were his
Great Books of the Western World
, a hardbound series published in 1952, fifty-four volumes covering classic literature, including works of fiction, history, natural science, philosophy, mathematics, and religion. I didn't tell him that the information contained in these books is readily available on the Internet, or that it would be cheaper for him to mail order new books and have them sent directly to his apartment in Mexico. He doesn't use computers, and anyway, once he sets his mind to something, he disregards all other options.

“On the bookcase next to my bed,” he said. As always, he over-pronounced his words: /book-kās/ with a double k sound, /nek-st / in two syllables.

“Yes, I know.”

“I must have them with me. They are monumental works by and about great authors. The most influential thinkers of our time.”

I know, I know, I fucking know.
But I did not say this either, because I've long understood that once he gets started he cannot stop. Cannot.

“Be sure to include the supplemental texts on Aristotle. Aristotle lived from 384 BC until 322 BC. He was a student of Plato and he taught Alexander the Great.”

My father's speech patterns—his vocabulary and syntax—are unusually formal. Classic Asperger's, from what I understand, albeit undiagnosed. His mannerisms certainly balance on the edge of the autism spectrum. Strained social interaction, repetitive patterns of behavior, hyper focus on specific interests—these traits manifest themselves as tiny droplets of personality toxins, not fatal, but unpleasant.

I doodled through his monologue on Plato and the dates of Chaucer and Sir Francis Bacon.

Also on his list: five pairs of leather shoes, four new suits, a case of unopened vitamin supplements, odor-free garlic tablets, a carton of bottles labeled A
LL
N
ATURAL
M
ALE
E
NHANCEMENT
, a small leather-bound address book, back issues of
Scientific American
, and several file folders of correspondence—each labeled by name—one marked S
TEPHEN
J
AY
G
OULD
.

“I'll be so grateful for you to send me these things, Carole.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I'm on the line between life and death. These things will keep me alive longer, do you understand?”

I suppose I said the things one is expected to say to a father. I suppose I said,
Don't be silly. You're not dying anytime soon
, or
Stop talking such nonsense
, or
But I thought you'd live to be one hundred and five—remember your plan? You're only eighty-two, so you have twenty-three years to go.
Or maybe I didn't say those things, but thought them instead. Our conversations are so cyclical, the topics so recurrent, including his ever-immediately impending death—which he's been predicting for some forty years now—that I often lose track of what I've specifically said on which day.

I cradled the phone against my jaw and bulleted each item with little curly-cues. In that moment I wasn't sure if I was a good daughter or a bad one. I said the things a daughter should say, carried out actions expected of me, took dictation, wrote the list—but part of me considered throwing the list away, folding it in half and letting it go in the breeze outside. While my father prepared for his final respite by gathering earthly items of comfort and interest, things to make his remaining life enjoyable, I wasn't sure I wanted to deliver. Perhaps if I withheld his treasures he would postpone his passage from this world—stave off death—in which case my inclination to tear up the list was morally just. On the other hand, my withholding would cause him some degree of discomfort. I could let him squirm down there in Mexico—waiting and waiting for his things that would never arrive—pinch him with passive-aggressive retaliation for my accumulated list of his past transgressions, a fuzzy litany I haven't fully articulated even to myself. Good daughter or bad? Perhaps I was both in that moment, a morally liminal creature with one foot on each side.

“Are you getting this all down?” he asked.

 

Four

 

Hordes of specimen jars once filled both my father's offices, one at the university where he taught in Southern California and a second study at home. Years after my parents split, he lived for a while in a double-wide mobile home in Chino where the hollow floor shook if you stepped too heavily, sending vibrations up the walls and rattling rows of specimen jars on their plywood shelves. When I was a teenager, visiting during the summer, I once slammed the door on purpose just to watch my friend Lana's reaction as the scorpions fluttered momentarily to life, their legs and pincers gently rising in rippling isopropyl tides sloshing rim to rim. I laughed when her shoulders instinctually flapped up and down in heebie-jeebie, get-them-off-me reflex. Her mouth contorted to expose her clenched teeth and she involuntarily bent forward to slap her bare shins repeatedly, as if the reptilian, survival part of her brain were unable to differentiate between real and imagined threats. While I now know that her reactive behavior typifies our genetic predisposition to fear animals that once posed a danger to ancient humans (as you can see, I've inherited some of my father's diction), I reveled in the in-between moment of unspoken what-ifs racing at lightning speed behind Lana's wide eyes, the what-should-I-do hypothetical scenario playing out in her head as her hypothalamus and sensory cortex conversed, assessing the repercussion of every decision should these scorpions be alive and loose.

Suppose you were bitten by a scorpion. Let's say the Deathstalker,
Apistobuthus pterygocercus
. The initial sting feels like several bee stings at once. You cry out in pain, then kick your foot into the air to jolt the scorpion from your ankle. Your heart races, banging furiously against your sternum; has the scorpion's venom caused your heart to pound, or is this merely a psychological reaction, you wonder. You linger for a few minutes, suspended in inaction, indecision—should you seek medical attention or just let the pain in your ankle subside? Let's say you wait it out. No need for drama. Scorpion stings are overrated, overplayed—the stories of agonizing deaths are urban legends grown to monstrosities, you reason. So you apply an ice pack to ease the pain in your ankle, the red circle radiating from the point of contact. Your heart pounds harder. Blood thrushes against your eardrums. You feel hot. You start to sweat. You close your eyes, lean back on the couch, and elevate your ankle with a pile of throw pillows. As neurotoxins surge through your brain, they clamp onto sodium channels, alternately blocking and activating signals to your nervous system.

The first convulsions take you by surprise—your arms tremble, your feet tingle, your lower abdomen contracts several times, like a shiver but stronger. You're neither moving your body nor are you still, you think; you quake on the threshold of voluntary physical action and involuntary reaction. It's time to seek help, so you look at the phone a few feet away; but within just this sliver of time, the time you took to contemplate your situation, paralysis has crept in. Your eyelids slam back in their utmost open position, your eyeballs halt, trapped in a frozen gaze, and your limbs, trembling, flop up and down with the rhythm of your heaving torso as it folds and unfolds like a piece of paper trapped in the wind. Finally your blood pressure drops and muscles release, loose again. The last thing you see is the telephone nestled uselessly in its cradle, and as fluid secretions seep into your lungs and pain-killing endorphins flood your brain, you welcome the coma, the sleep, the flood of deep relaxation that feels so, so good.

 

Five

 

The day after my father's phone call I began packing his books. The volumes on his list represent only a fraction of his library, so although I knew generally where to look in each room for specific titles, I opened all the blinds and doors to allow as much light into the house as possible. February's winter chill wafted in from the front and back yards, and although I intended to work quickly and with big body movements in order to stave off the cold, I found myself lingering, occasionally pausing to open certain books. At first my curiosity was random—pull a book, crack it open, notice a word or two, slide it into the open banker's box on the floor. I lifted
The Rites of Passage
, originally published in 1908, reprinted in 1960. The pages smelled of dust, of moisture. I read. Pondered. Reached for the dictionary to look something up, then the encyclopedia, then back to
The Rites of Passage
, then reached for something else, losing myself in a linked meandering of then-and-then, piling open books on the carpet around me rather than filling the cardboard box.

My digressive thread—liminality: The condition of being on a threshold or at the beginning of a process. To be
in “limbo,”
says anthropologist Arnold van Gennep,
is to inhabit an intermediate, ambivalent zone
. In liminal phase an individual experiences a blurring of social environment and reality, occupies the in-between stage. The term derives from the Latin
limen
, which means
boundary, transitional mark, passage between two different places. Liminal space represents a threshold of a physiological or psychological response,
the place where you teeter between action and inaction, the moment you consider calling for help; the instant your eyes dart between the phone and the red spot spreading from your ankle; the window of time between your last inhalation and your first convulsion—and there it is, the sliver of time that precedes paralysis, a sliver so fine, so sharp it defies balance. You must step off, onto one side or the other. Go or stay; float or sink; here or there. Which way will you lean?

And what can I say to ease your fear, dear father, alleviate your angst:
one hundred and five, remember the plan?
Or maybe I should give you a push instead, tell you to count backward from eighty-two and let your abdomen sink, rest on the smooth glass bottom. When the lid turns to seal the portal, the flood will feel so, so good. Liminality:
The psychological point beyond which a sensation becomes too faint to be experienced.

By noon, the liminal hour between morning's lingering chill and afternoon's oncoming warmth, the neighborhood outside my father's silent front door chirped with sounds of life. I looked up from whichever book I held and walked to the window. Two young mothers from around the block pushed strollers side by side in the street as a preschooler rode his bicycle alongside them on the sidewalk, his rear tire balanced unsteadily but safely between two spinning plastic training wheels. I imagine that if that little boy were to fall, if the training wheels failed to keep him upright, he would not hesitate to cry out for help, and his mother would rush to his aid, either tilting the bike upright to get him back on track or scooping him up off the ground should he topple to the concrete.

I remember the first time I rode a two-wheeler, a secondhand blue-and-white Schwinn my parents had picked up at Leroy's Thrift Store in Pomona the winter of my first-grade year. I don't recall my father being present for that particular rite of passage, the day I learned to ride a bike. He wasn't the type to ride bikes, play ball, or attend Open House at my elementary school, but preferred instead to hole up in his study alone, or engage a few of his students in deep intellectual debate while smoking pot under the fig tree in our backyard. Lana was there the day of my inaugural lesson, though, along with a gaggle of neighborhood kids. One of the tall boys from the apartments across the street instructed me while the other kids huddled around. We stood at the interior end of my parents' driveway, a long concrete corridor shaded by thick mulberry trees and the slatted-wood carport covering, a structure my father had built the preceding fall. The tall boy braced the bike upright as I climbed into place and rested my feet on the pedals. The other kids all shouted instructions at me as I sat on the wide leather seat, still unmoving, still braced, aimed toward sunny Ninth Street at the other end of the dark driveway.

“Ready?” the tall boy asked.

I didn't answer right away. I paused. A moment of indecision.

The kids' voices swirled past my ears, making little sense to me at that moment—advice on which way to lean, how to grip the handlebars, how pressing backward on the pedals would engage the coaster brake. One voice I did hear, though. “We'll catch you if you fall,” someone said.