Relativity (28 page)

Ethan shuffled his feet on the floor. “Cool.”

“Listen, I know your mother doesn't want us to meet. And if you don't want to, I understand. But I'm in Sydney at the moment and I'd really like to see you. Maybe we could have lunch or something?”

“Okay,” Ethan said without hesitating.

“Do you think you could meet me at Circular Quay? Are you okay to get the train?”

“I could catch the bus. I catch the bus by myself all the time.”

“One o'clock?”

Now Ethan felt panicky. His father meant today. That was in less than two hours. He wasn't sure which bus went all the way down to Circular Quay or how long it would take to get there. Usually he was only allowed to catch the bus to school and had never gone into the city alone on the weekend. And he couldn't just leave the house while Mum was sleeping, not without telling her where he was going or who he'd be with. That was against the rules.

“Yep,” Ethan said, ignoring his head. “See you at one o'clock.”

Mark paused. “Thanks for calling me, mate.”

“It's nothing,” Ethan said quickly and hung up the phone.

But it wasn't nothing. Ethan didn't know why he'd said that. Blood rushed to his face, his eyes felt full; he'd said lots of wrong things on the phone. Ethan thought about all those times he'd walked along busy streets, staring at strangers and wondering if they were his dad. All those nights when he'd asked himself questions about his father to lull himself to sleep: what's his favorite color, what's his favorite book, what's his favorite song?

Maybe Ethan didn't want answers to those questions. It was far easier to have his father only exist inside his head. That abstract figure—who didn't have a voice, a face, or a phone number—had done a bad thing. Ethan wasn't sure how to feel about the real person, about the voice he'd just spoken with. Should he love Mark because he was his dad? Should he hate him for what he did? This wasn't nothing. It was everything.

Ethan had often daydreamed about finally meeting his dad. In the dreams, his father stepped out of an unfolding wall of smoke. It was always epic, as they looked at each other for the first time—one of those moments where everything explodes. The Big Bang. It made something inside Ethan stop feeling empty and broken; the white noise that buzzed constantly inside his brain disappeared.

He opened the door of his wardrobe and considered what to wear. All his clothes seemed kind of wrong, childish. Nothing was right. Eventually, he chose jeans and a black T-shirt and studied his reflection in the mirror. He wondered if his father would know it was him, if Mark would recognize his own son's face.

But Ethan's fantasies of epic explosions now seemed inappropriate. This was more complicated—his father had hurt him, committed a crime. It was reassuring that Mark sounded nice on the phone, but he might still be a bad person. Ethan's formless dreams hadn't updated to take those unpleasant things into account as the mythical father figure emerged from the fog. He felt scared for a second but pushed the fear out of his mind. His father wasn't going to shake him; he wasn't a baby anymore.

Maybe Mum was really sick and wouldn't notice if he left. Ethan peeked into her bedroom. She'd be furious he was going to the city by himself without permission—he'd be grounded forever—and she'd go absolutely berserk if she knew Ethan was going to meet his dad. But he'd have to deal with that later, he didn't want to be late. Ethan trembled as he snuck out the front door and hurried down the hill to the bus stop.

Ω

MARK STOOD
under the glass shelter outside Circular Quay train station. He carefully watched people step off every bus across the road. Traces of last night's storm remained; the pavement was coated in a slick of dirty water and the crisp smell of rain hung in the air. Mark's stomach rumbled. He glanced up across the road at the red and yellow signage of McDonald's on the corner, and contemplated grabbing something quick to eat. Ethan needed lunch too, and he'd probably be happy with a burger. Twelve-year-old boys loved fast food. Didn't they?

As Mark lined up and stared at the colorful backlit menus, it dawned on him that he didn't know what his son liked to eat. Did Ethan have allergies? Was he vegetarian? Mark had no idea. When it was his turn to order, he panicked and bought almost everything on the menu. Cheeseburgers, Quarter Pounders, nuggets with every flavor of sauce, salad wraps—enough for twelve people, not two. He carried the heavy brown bags back to the bus stop, the greasy smell of French fries sticking to his clothes. It was too much food.

Passengers poured out of blue buses.

He opened his wallet and looked at the old photograph of Ethan. He wouldn't look like that now: not even a year old, round and dribbling. Mark was this boy's father, but he felt like an interloper. What sort of father knew nothing about his only child? Didn't even know what Ethan looked like. He scratched the back of his head and thought fleetingly of his own dad—how John had begged for this meeting, how this encounter was happening too late.

Mark looked up from his wallet. From the corner of his eye, he recognized the hair first. He'd fought with a comb every morning to control those exact waves. At school they'd teased him, said he looked like a mental patient, called him Young Einstein. Since then, he'd always slicked his hair to the side with gel. And there it was, that unruly black hair on another head.

Ethan looked across the road, his eyes darting back and forth. He was taller than Mark had expected, much older looking. Mark couldn't remember how tall twelve-year-olds should be; he hadn't been that age for a long time. Ethan crossed the street. Their eyes met. Mark immediately noticed the shape and color of the boy's eyes—that piece of Claire transplanted onto someone else's face. It dislocated him.

Mark waved with his free hand.

The boy stumbled up to him, his mouth slightly open. “Excuse me, sir,” he said softly. “Is your name Mark Hall?”

Mark nodded, speechless.

“I'm Ethan. I'm, um, your son.” Then the boy quickly looked away.

Mechanically, Mark held out his arm to shake Ethan's hand. Suddenly it seemed a peculiar thing to do, an unnatural ritual. The boy didn't seem to understand immediately; he tilted his head, confused by this offering of an arm in the air. Then he grasped Mark's hand and looked cautiously into his eyes.

Mark tried to make sure his handshake was gentle.

Ethan let go first.

“It's nice to meet you,” Mark said.

“It's nice to meet you,” the boy repeated, with stiff politeness.

He's shy, Mark thought to himself, examining his son's face. He tried to fill in the gaps—how Ethan had grown from a chubby baby into this almost adolescent boy—because now he had bone structure, thick eyebrows. Mark felt an affinity with him and recognized his awkwardness: he'd been painfully shy at this age too, always wary of new people, overanalyzing everything. Replaying conversations in his head and wincing at all the pathetic things that came out of his mouth. He hoped his son didn't suffer from that same gnawing self-consciousness he'd once felt too.

Ethan kept his eyes on the ground, tightly holding his arms to his body. The boy was quiet and watchful, evaluating his father's every move. It made Mark feel like an experiment, like a scientist conducting research was observing him in a lab. Occasionally, Ethan shot glances at him but never for more than a second. Mark realized he'd have to work hard to get the boy's guard down. He had to find a way to connect and figure out how to gain his son's trust.

“I've brought lunch,” Mark said shakily. He hadn't expected to feel so nervous. His stomach was in knots. “I thought we could eat in the park.”

Ethan looked at the bulging paper bags. “Is someone else coming too?”

“Nope, just us. Let's walk down this way.”

They headed toward the narrow stairs that led to a tunnel, through the cobblestoned laneways of the Rocks. As they waited at the intersection, an old woman looked at them both and smiled. Mark felt a burst of pride and smiled back. Yes, this was his son, thank you for noticing. But as the traffic light changed from red to green, Mark couldn't meet her eyes again. He didn't deserve that smile; he was an impostor, a fraud. But Ethan didn't notice the exchange.

They stopped for a moment and listened to the didgeridoo player sitting in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Tourists crowded around him and threw coins into a bucket. The music rumbled and purred.

“Look,” Ethan said. “That sounds funny. The resonances occur at frequencies that aren't harmonically spaced.”

“You can hear that?” Mark raised an eyebrow. “It's because the didgeridoo is an open-closed pipe, so we hear that low drone plus the acoustics of the player's mouth. And because of the shape of the tube. Termites ate the wood, so the inside has irregular contours.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. They're low-frequency waves.”

Mark shook his head in disbelief and stared openly at Ethan. How on earth did he know that? Claire was right. Their son was some kind of genius—his kind of genius. Mark could talk the talk, but he couldn't distinguish harmonic spacing of frequencies.

“So, do you like school?” he asked.

“Nobody likes school.” Ethan put his hands in his pockets.

“What's your favorite subject?”

“Science, obviously,” Ethan shrugged. There was something in the way he moved his face, his nonchalant expressions, that seemed exactly like Claire. But Mark's genetic information was stamped all over this boy and he couldn't believe how much he saw of himself, his father, his brother. He couldn't take his eyes off him.

“Me too,” Mark said. “I used to be a scientist. Particle physicist, actually.”

They walked up the incline to Observatory Hill Park.

“I knew that. Well, not about the particles. How come you're not one now?”

“Didn't finish my thesis,” Mark said, looking at the white rotunda in front of them. “So never got my PhD. Ended up working in a different field. Do you want to sit over here?” He pointed to a picnic table that was covered in scraps of rain.

“Okay. So do you have a job?”

“I work near Kalgoorlie at a mine, although not down the mine. In a lab.” Mark dried the wet seat with a McDonald's napkin and offered Ethan the paper bag full of food.

Ethan looked gingerly into the bag and took the cheeseburger. “I'm not allowed to eat McDonald's. Mum says the meat comes from factory farms and processed food gives you cancer.”

It took a moment for Mark to process who Ethan was talking about. Mum—that was what he called Claire. He noticed the methodical way the boy's hands unwrapped the yellow paper off the burger. Those were Mark's fingers, only smaller, more youthful. It was confusing to see a piece of himself transposed on somebody else. Mark felt curiously impelled to touch them, like a magnet seeking metal. “Well,” he said, taking a bite from a burger. “Lunch will have to be our little secret.”

“My rabbit is named Quark,” Ethan said proudly.

It made Mark laugh. “That's a wonderful name for a rabbit.”

“Yeah, I know. When I grow up, I want to get a PhD. I'm not sure what about yet, but definitely in physics. What was yours about?” Ethan stuffed a handful of fries into his mouth.

Mark paused. He hadn't thought much about his thesis for years. Remembering his abandoned research left a bitter taste in his mouth, like recalling a relationship turned sour, a painful memory that still stings. “My research topic was anomalous parity asymmetry in the Cosmic Microwave Background.”

“What's that?”

“Right after the Big Bang, lots of antimatter was destroyed. The known universe is basically the leftovers of the fight between matter and antimatter. My thesis was about why antimatter lost, why there's more matter in the universe.”

Ethan stopped eating and looked up. “Like particles and antiparticles.”

“Exactly. Electrons and positrons. Do you know anything about Paul Dirac?”

“
The Principles of Quantum Mechanics
,” Ethan said quickly. “Dirac worked at Cambridge. Just like Stephen Hawking.”

Mark blinked, impressed. “So you know Dirac predicted the positron. Let's say this cheeseburger is an atom. And the pickle inside is an electron. From what we know about the laws of quantum mechanics, electrons are restricted to a few paths called quantum states. In other words, the pickle is stuck to the cheese. Quantum theory says electrons are like pickles, and two pickles in one cheeseburger are too many. Dirac called this the exclusion principle: no two electrons in a collection can occupy the same quantum state. Which implies that electrons can have negative energy.”

“Negative energy,” Ethan repeated.

Mark took a sip of soft drink. He was probably boring the kid. Everyone hated when Mark started talking in scientific analogy like this. Let's say this cheeseburger is an atom! Electrons are like pickles! No wonder Ethan was looking away, his eyes fixed on something in the distance.

Neither of them said anything for a while.

Ethan broke the silence. “Did you get the Father's Day cards?” he asked.

“Yes, I did. Thank you.” Mark hadn't meant to sound so wooden.

“Yeah, you're welcome.”

Both of them finished their lunch quietly. Ethan ate a second burger, peeling the sticky orange cheese off the waxy wrapper and rolling it into tiny balls before putting them in his mouth. Crumbs lured the seagulls and ibises; with piping cries they fought over dropped fries, jousting with their black beaks like swords.

“Look, there's a sandpiper.” Mark pointed at the speckled brown bird, poking its bill into the soil. “You only see them in Sydney a couple of months a year.”

Ethan threw the bird a cold fry. “How come?”