“Suit still fit?” my father asks.
“Well enough, unless I decide to start chopping wood.”
“You got an axe?”
“Nope. But I left my Swiss Army knife back in the truck just in case.”
Less than a day ago, my father and I had driven halfway across our town, talked to what felt like half a dozen people, and at the end of our quest had found only one person capable of knotting the tie that now encircles my neck. That one person had turned out to be a mortician, and he had only able to successfully complete the operation after I had lain down on his sofa.
I suppose it must have had something to do with muscle memory and the relative orientation of cadavers.
“Nervous?” my father asks, almost eager. I don’t doubt the man loves me, but he does like to see me sweat.
“Not sure.” I’m typically the last to know when I’m having intense emotions. I dissociate long before it can become obvious. “Guess we’ll find out if I suddenly throw up on someone.”
With the tie hanging down my chest like a flaccid noose, I can’t help but feel like I’m dressed for my own funeral. I find this to be funny, although I’m not really sure why.
I should probably be worried for my future, but I’m not.
I’m reassured to know that there’s no real need to worry seeing as how myself and everyone I love will be dead eventually. I laugh loud enough for my aunt Debbie to wonder what I think is so funny.
I reply “nothing” as always.
This is an interview for a scholarship. A prestigious scholarship, that has a four letter name attached to it, so sacred it is like a curse word pulled from a mirror. A blessing that means Science, Civilization, and Hope.
NASA.
The four letter word that means National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
The people that put a man on the moon would like to help me leave the Harbor and become a scientist. I watch my father squint at a sign, trying to sound out the letters, and I smile again. I’m not sure which feat would be more impressive.
Wait till I find out I’m a Harbor Man’s son and they’ll bury me for sure. Put these calloused hands on a microscope? No sir. It would be heresy. So it feels good to know that I’m wearing clothes in which I could be buried. I hate hassle.
“You look like hell, Dad.” Although my father always looks a bit haggard, morning’s are really not his time to shine.
“So do you.”
“Slick as the devil himself, am I?”
My aunt Debbie clucks at us. She came along to keep an eye on my father, and serve as a stand in for my mother. We might pass for a regular family if no one looks too close.
“I think you look very nice, BC.” She reassures.
“Thank you, kindly.”
I really don’t know how to deal with compliments, so I turn away. “Excuse me… is this Bailey Hall?” I ask a woman striding down the hall.
She stops to inspect me, a chair in each hand. I blush under the scrutiny. This is no Harbor woman. This is no “gal” from the tavern who likes quarter a song jukeboxes and sawdust on wooden planks. She has not dedicated her life to drunken excess because she can’t express herself. This is an educated woman. This is a lady.
She assigns price tags to my clothes with her eyes. She looks for function in the shape of my pockets. I have no pockets for calculators, multi-tools, compasses, or any of the other bare essentials. And now that I think of it: How am I supposed to feel safe without any of my tools?
I decide that I hate these clothes even more than before. What with making a man walk around without the basic necessities of computation.
She’s still looking me over.
“Yes. Are you here for the Space Grant interview?” She asks so sweetly, I almost can’t believe she had pulled me apart like that less than five seconds ago.
“Yes! Are you Brenda?” I go a shade of blood red so deep I may as well not even have skin. It takes me a moment to catch my bearings. I feel so out of place, I can barely remember my own name. This not only feels like a foreign city, but a foreign world.
Is this nervousness?
Do I care about today somewhere deep down?
Having no idea, I decided to approximate my next actions on the assumption that I am a real person.
“May I carry these chairs for you?” I grab them before she has a chance to decline. I figure this might be offensive.
I smile. If you smile bright enough no one will yell at you for being inappropriate. If I were handsome, it might even be charming, but we all have to use the hand we’re dealt.
I realize I’ve forgotten something else, put down a chair, and extend my hand. I’ve got about the same instinct for social etiquette as I have for navigation in n-space when the dimension is higher than three.
I wonder if I should say this out loud… I wonder if this is a joke Brenda would appreciate…. And that makes me think about all the other science jokes I have. Oh Christ… there are millions… none of them ever shared because there was no one to share them with….
“I’m BC Woods, pleased to make your acquaintance.” Brenda is a nice person so she doesn’t seem at all bothered that my hand has the muggy humidity of a tropical jungle. My dad picks up the other chair, smiles, and extends his own even bigger hand. I call them the hams and pickles, both for their size and for their appearance of use.
By some miracle my father manages to introduce himself and my aunt without saying fuck. Not even once.
I will compliment him on this later.
We’d had an awful long talk about swears the night previous. My father was fresh off his fourth divorce, and had recently managed to scream the c-word in the middle of a crowded bank. The same bank where my aunt Debbie works. I wasn’t about to take his self-control on faith.
We are well over a half an hour early, so I volunteer us to help Brenda take the chairs into the conference room. When we’re done there’s an awkard beat before I volunteer us back to the lobbie and await the arrival of the other finalists. Brenda hastily agrees, as she has much work to do, and was probably unsure of how to dismiss us from the room.
“So we got to get up at five in the morning, and carry chairs. Great so far.” My father opines.
“Well, seeing as how the last time you’ve had to get up early on behalf of one of your kids, it was court appointed, I’d say we’re still ahead of the curve.” It had been a very loud day at the house when I found out that MIP wasn’t a military acronym.
My father laughs as my aunt Debbie chides me. Your sister tries she says. She tries.
I take this opportunity to commit Brenda’s name to memory. For whatever reason, I have no faculty to remember things about people other than their faces and personal stories. Names allude me completely. Written words, however, sink into me like bones fallen into tar.
I imagine Brenda’s face as a picture, and I write her name on it three times in red. I put it in the part of my brain where I keep all my facts. Down the place where names and birthdays will never go without special instruction. The number of centimeters in an inch. The average acceleration due to gravity on the surface of Terra. The conversions between Fahrenheit, Celsius, and Kelvin.
I will do this throughout the day, and dump the information when it is no longer necessary. There will be no long pauses during greetings where I cannot remember a name, there will be no….
“Jesus Christ, that’s a lot of gooks.” My father says abruptly.
“Excuse me?” I say.
“Gooks.” He points.
There is no real racial animosity in this. It is more the shock of a man who has spent his whole life in a place where non-caucasians are as rare as unicorns. I feel the same way. Whenever I see a black person, I almost want to run up and ask them what it feels like to be from Minas Tirith.
I turn my head.
And blink twice.
He’s right.
That is a lot of… Asian Americans.
They’re all my age or my fathers. One of them looks astonishingly like the physicist Michio Kaku. The adults are dressed as am I: glasses, tweed jackets, and khaki pants. I am stunned by their poise.
That’s not just a lot of Asian Americans. It’s a lot of well-educated well-bred human beings. Something that, despite my tie, I most certainly am not.
I realize that the other people my age are dressed casually, and feel like an asshole. Of course the scholarship committee wouldn’t expect any of us to know how to dress. We’re technical people. Asking technical people to dress appropriately is like… well, better not even get myself in the mood to stereotype anymore than I already am.
I come back to the moment. Gook is an inappropriate word, I do believe.
“Please don’t say that again.” I whisper.
He grunts. Well, at least he didn’t say fucking gooks.
I greet the other applicants as best I can, doing my best to betray at no time that I actually have no idea how to conduct the business I’m about. I scribble their names on mental mugshots, and tuck them away. I hate names. No patterns. After I memorize twenty names, I lose track of time, and want to scream “Somebody give me a fucking trend-line!”
The doors to the room re-opens. I take a seat toward the back next to Michio Kaku’s clone and his son David.* It would seem David’s passion is pure mathematics. I tell him I have a desire to get into gene-engineering. We swap ideas for a while.
“I wonder if they’re Japs or Chinks.” Thankfully mumbled.
I would scold, but it would be out of place. Plus, the n-word had been acceptable in the Harbor until the late 90′s. Not everyone can learn at the same pace. Plus, to be positive, at least he realizes that all Asian people aren’t the same.
A few more people filter into the room. One person, who I flippantly decide is a male model, I dub as Fancy Pants.** I dislike him as he is well dressed, well proportioned, and good looking. His presence in this room means he’s brilliant. I’m good with numbers, but at least I have the decency to be ugly. Another boy enters, Hispanic. I memorize his face and call him Francisco D’Anconia because its memorable and it makes me giggle. There’s one girl in the room.
I write “GIRL” on her mugshot until I can find out her real name.
I wonder if Girl feels awkward about being the only girl in the room. I decide to be positive about this, and think of this as an increase in actual females instead of a deviation from theoretical females. It’s a step in the right direction, at least.
In order to not be sad that there are no blacks in the room I decide that at least that means there is one less slur to worry about. Still, it would be nice to see a few.
The introductions start, and I can feel the attention span of the room plummet. Say one thing for technicals, say we don’t really give a shit about clerical data. Just point us to the chalkboard, leave the lights on, and put a vending machine nearby, thank you.
Another speaker takes the stage and gives a presentation on his research project. The attention level soars. I want to applaud, and to my incredible delight I see that the others with me also want to cheer. I am nineteen years old, and this is the first time I have seen a room full of people focused on an idea.
This is family. We are all bound up together in this new priesthood of Form and Fabric, where ideas are thrown against the universe like rocks across a lake, until finally one skips a little further than the others toward an unseen shore. Because we are scientists and thinkers it never occurs to us that what might be on that other shore could be anything but wonderful, even if we get there and find there is no God. We look at the speaker, joy pouring into us, saying “Yes! Yes! Tell us what the Universe has told you through your machines! Tell us how you forced the nothing to give forth constants, equations, and laws!”
My father looks not unlike a boxer trying to conceal the fact that being punched in the face really really hurts. I mean fuck. There’s a hand full of bones smacking you in the fucking jaw.
“You okay?” I whisper.
My father blinks like he doesn’t even know about language anymore, let alone speak the variant of it known as English.
My aunt Debbie appears only to have withstood a light mugging. Michio Kaku and his son David have been invigorated by this presentation. Filled with holy light. We smile at one another like hippies on an acid trip. The lecture ends, and I have a million questions. David and I pull out a piece of paper and try to reconstruct several bits of data from first principles that had not seemed clear.
Michio Kaku whose real name I have not yet heard, tries to engage my father in a discussion on Descartes. My father turns to my aunt Debbie as if begging her to cut the swelling around his eyes, so he can at least have the dignity of seeing the person hitting him in the face.
David and I are still working out a few details when we’re broken off into groups. David goes off to his interview, I go off to a presentation about robotic sea probes. My father is told he is going to a special program for adults, and as I leave he seems to plead with me for a stay of execution.
“Just think about tits,” I whisper in his ear as I hug him goodbye.
The grad student giving the presentation accidentally says picometer instead of femtometer when discussing the nucleus of an atom. I arch my eyebrow. Wonder of wonders, everyone in the room with me knows that it is appropriate to laugh. He chuckles, confesses that we’ve “caught him” and he changes his notation from “pm” to “fm.”
At the next presentation, we’re all old friends, and we play around with a device designed to use sonic waves to break up tumors using the principle of cavitation. Typical star in a jar stuff. I ask the grad student how the hell they can image anything in real time with all the interference. He tells me they don’t do anything in America. They go to China, get a relative orientation, and use something called “The Ouch Minus” technique.
“What’s that?”
“We get a guy in a hot tub, who is going to be dead from a tumor in six months. We get the machine set up and we hit him. If he says ouch, we dial it down a notch and try again.”
“That’s brilliant.”
Since I am caught up in the awe of science, it doesn’t occur to me that maybe that dying man’s family would like to have him around for another six months, so I don’t even feel bad about it until almost a year later when it occurs to me again in the middle of the night.
We observe a polymerization reaction in a chem lab, and blow up some hydrogen. That shit sure knows how to pop. I wish they would have let me throw the potassium metal in the water… I do so love watching it burn. I leave the lab reluctantly… so many chemicals unmixed.
Then we’re in for the interview. I’m so jazzed up on science and mystery, that I plow through the first few questions like a gamma knife through mutated flesh. I design a hypothetical Martian lander with one of my interviewers, taking the question he had given me and turning it into a back and forth, as we figure out what such a device would have to have in order to accurately test for life, while troubleshooting each others suggestions.
Next is my favorite subject, which is gene engineering. The question is a total softball.
“What do you feel about the repercussions of gene-engineering adults has on their offspring?”
I want to say “about jack shit unless you’ve contaminated the germ lines.” I explain in more polite terms, and then ask her what she’s heard of any new research into gene-engineering adults because last I heard that was a good way to get horrible mutations. Yeah, you don’t have leukemia anymore, but it’s a crap shoot as to whether or not you get cancer. So I ask about restriction enzymes I’ve read about on-line and ask for other materials.
This is me at my most quick, most brilliant, and most relaxed. I am too caught up in grand ideas to worry about how other people are feeling. It also me at my most horrible, most oblivious, and most prone to accidentally hurting someone.
I want to talk more about science. I want to take apart a machine, cut myself on its wires, and put it back together better than it was before.
“Where do you see yourself in ten years?” She asks.
And I am floored all at once, because it has nothing at all to do with science. I feel like I have tripped in site of a finish line, because I am suddenly acutely aware of the differences between myself and the kids next to me. Namely that they are kids and that I am something else.
They are nervous, but for the wrong reasons. They are worried they might not get into the college of their choice. They are worried about not having the kinds of careers they want.
They have forgotten the old gods. The gods of hunger, and pain, and death. They have never known what it is to be struck, or beaten, or laughed at while bleeding. They have never been denied and unloved. They have never tested their mettle.
I am nineteen, and have known myself to be capable of murder and fatherhood. I have watched my best friend die, and seen the girl I love bound in a wheelchair. Where am I going to be in ten years?
Done. Dead, I hope. Back in the ground. Worm bait. What the hell was there really left for me to do other than dick around until something unfortunate happened?
I can’t think of a single thing left on my list that I really need to check off before checking out. I won’t kill myself to get dead. Not my style but… I cannot imagine the tediousness of the years between then and old age. What would be the purpose of it all? I had known I would die alone since I was only a boy. I was never going to have children. I didn’t even particularly want to live around other people.
And there it was again. The difference. In that room, we all believed in evolution, but I was the only person who believed they were an ape. I was the only person who had come close enough to death to embrace the animal strength and instinct necessary to survive. They were… innocent. Good. Living without knowledge of true evil.
I give some bullshit answer about how I want to meet the basic needs of the world through science… which is something I’d like to do, but I’m really passionate about it. Who the hell doesn’t want people not to starve? The important thing was that I let them know that I had heard of Abraham Maslow. I left feeling not very confident.
I met my father again in the main room, eating a sandwich like he had just come off the Bataan Death March. He understood the eating of sandwiches, and the eating of it was something he could do with confidence. His whole day had been spent being repeatedly reminded that there were levels of understanding of which he had not even been aware, and it was good to have a bedrock. Even if it was roast beef and bread.
“BC?” he asks, very concerned.
“Yeah dad?”
“Are you smarter than gooks?”
“Some of them. Others, no. Same as with anyone else, I guess.”
“Because they took us off to a bunch of places, BC… and those chinks were talking about all kinds of crazy shit.”
“I’ll be fine dad. There’ll be water if God wills it.” Someone in the room jumps. I turn and smile. This is the first time in my life I have made a “Gunslinger” reference and had it understood. I hope he didn’t hear the slurs.
I am touched enough by my father’s worry that I don’t tell him he is being inappropriate. After all, he is my father, and he is like a son to me. Aunt Debbie looks similarly shaken, but is taking it much better. I was pretty sure that before that day my father thought almost all of science was people just talking out of their asshole.
When he gets home he makes to go to bed with a stunning display of exhaustion. I have seen him work almost two days straight and never even yawn. Having heard numbers all day has worn him thin.
“Any idea what you want to do with your life?” he asks.
“Nope.” I take the tie off. It feels good not to be hanged.
“I suppose you can figure that out at college.”
“Reckon so.”
“Night, BC.”
“Well, it’s still the afternoon… but night, dad.”
I go up to my office. I figure it’s an office and not a room since I don’t have a bed and I sleep on the floor. Also, I have a desk. A great big thing I got out of a dumpster. I pull out the drawer on one of my file cabinets. I pull out a folder marked “medicine” and start making notes. I need to incorporate what I’ve learned into the fabric of my hobby.
Since I was very young I have been building a world. A world to live in when things got bad. A place to go when Mike hit my mom, and I was just a boy watching two babies with no idea what the hell I was doing. It started off with dragons and silly adventures, but as I got older it advanced. It needed to be real now. Real as raisins, rainbows, and rational numbers.
I write the word “Restriction Enzymes” and “Entropically Favored DNA Binding.” I begin to write out some notes for how I think medicine would have worked in the technological past of my pretend world. This involves the invention of plausible but fake technologies. There are some hundred folders in the cabinet. The story itself is on my computer. After I write a while, I put the folder away and boot the computer. Time crank out some narrative.
I know what I’m writing isn’t very good. In fact, it kind of sucks. The people all sound the same. There’s not enough diversity. But it’s okay, because I know I’m wet cement. I’ve seen and done a lot. I’m a little bit tired of it all, but I’m still nineteen. If I just keep drawing the shape of what I want to be in the cement it’ll dry and that’s what I’ll be.
I lied just a little bit in my interview. While I did feel most of my life would be just dicking around, I didn’t necessarily think that was a horrible thing. I had a very good idea that when I “grew up” I would dick around with words.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to stories.
*I had advanced math with David. David is probably the smartest human being I have ever met in my entire life.
**Fancy Pants and I also took advanced math together, as well as literature of the renaissance and enlightment. Nice guy.
