Part 8 (2/2)

I am watching my self thinking, We should have stayed in our garage 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 s.p.a.ce. 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-s.h.i.+ning 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 a.s.sorted 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 embarra.s.sment 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 pus.h.i.+ng his hand up against it, as in, Oh what's happened, oh why now, why like this, betrayed by his own invention, the anguished embarra.s.sment 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 gra.s.s, 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 Sat.u.r.days I spent in the dank garage instead of in this bath of sunlight and heat and blue and green, embarra.s.sed for how little I had lived, how little my father had lived, wondering if it was something I would pa.s.s 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 b.u.mmer days with the occasional chance at getting a win against life 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 fatherson 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 d.i.n.ky 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. .h.i.tting it, I don't think he believed it was happening. I remember thinking how much I wanted that to be my fatherson 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 gra.s.s 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 sh.e.l.l, 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 )

from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe 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.

His invention may have been a failure, but his idea wasn't. As it turned out, and I wouldn't find this out until much later, there were twin projects. The director of the inst.i.tute had already gone to visit another inventor, not far from our town, actually about half an hour away on the peninsula, where sometimes my mom and I would go have a picnic if my dad was working on the weekend. The houses there had Spanish tile roofs and mailboxes with roofs, too, and little doors, and the driveways were circular, for receiving guests, I guess, and there was a small park that overlooked the ocean, and a swing set and even a cast-iron jungle gym, shaped like a rocket, for kids to crawl up into, a set of bent metal rods, curved perfectly and painted red and white and blue. This other inventor had had a very similar idea to my father's, the differences being mostly in execution, and the only real difference being that, on the day of his visit, his idea worked. That day in the park was my father's chance, our chance to be a part of it, but the director already had seen that the idea could work and didn't need to find a second diamond in the rough. That part of it would have hurt my father, I know, to know that it was possible for someone like him, a talented amateur, out in the sticks, a moonlighting cubicle worker, a wage-earner-by-day, inventor-by-night, to make it. It would have killed him to know that someone had done it, that all his work had been correct, all the work that he had dumped, a week after that day in the park, all the notebooks, in pieces, scattered and scribbled over hundreds of pages, on sc.r.a.ps, on Post-it notes, on index cards, in margins of books, on backs of envelopes taped and folded and crumpled and uncrumpled and crumpled again. It would have killed him to know that it hadn't been impossible, our dream, but that we got one chance only, just once in a lifetime, and we had lost it. And with that, our idea, our prototype was the one lost to history. My father would forever be the guy who did not get the credit, the one swallowed up, enveloped by obscurity, swept away and lost in time.

If I could tell him just one thing, wherever he is, pa.s.s him one message, it would be this: he had something. Something to his thoughts, his ideas, the papers in his notebooks, the work we did in the garage. Beyond just a purity to his ideas, a sincerity to his belief, a genuine curiosity, a determination that, if he just sat there long enough, thought hard enough, failed enough times, he'd find a way in. His idea was good enough, would have been good enough for the director, for the world, good enough to be a serious contribution to the field of fictional science, good enough for me, but I don't know where he is, and I have never been able to tell him this.

Here in the garage, where I watched him while he worked, twisting this, tightening that, and realized, not that I didn't know it, but saw more clearly that, fundamentally, my father is, was, has always been a sad man. Sadness was the driver, the motor of his invention, the engine of his creativity. The sadness was generational, acc.u.mulated like heavy elements in us, like we were large sea life, enormous ocean fish, swimming silent, collecting the sadness and moving through the deep with it, never stopping, always increasing the quant.i.ty in our bodies, always moving forward, never fully sleeping, eaters of sadness. Bite by bite, meal by meal, becoming made of sadness. Pa.s.sed down like an inheritance, a negative inheritance, a long line of poor, clever men, growing, over time, slightly less poor, and slightly more clever, but never wise.

I remember one late-December morning in my father's study, one of the last days of the year, felt like it was the end of something more. Not the best year, the family had seen better. Overnight the rain and winds had washed the sky and world of all haze and the early-morning light was even, perfect, the light of an artist's studio. I was nine years old and my mother had told me to ask my father to come have breakfast. The clock in the kitchen was ticking. It was a blue plastic circle with a white face, and standard black arrows pointing to hours and minutes and a thin red needle for the second hand, which made discrete movements, jumped from mark to mark in its circ.u.mnavigation, with a kind of abrupt yet soft bouncing motion, and a sound that always seemed louder than it should have been.

I called to my father a few times and, not hearing any response, walked down the hall, afraid of what I might find, not hearing a sound, and then, as I approached, I heard a m.u.f.fled noise, a sound I was certain I had never heard before, and as I peeked in through the mostly closed door of his small office, I saw, for the first time in my life, my father's eyes red and cheeks and chin wet with tears. He was looking at a picture of my grandfather, the one I never met, who died when I was six months old, who died on a different continent, an ocean away, poor and broken and missing his oldest son. I stood there in the hall, a few feet outside the threshold of my father's private study, watching him, looking at him framed by the door, while he looked at his own father, framed in the picture, the three of us, son, father, and grandfather, forming a melancholy axis, forming a chain, a regress, a bridge into the past.

TAMMY makes her face pretty and blows me a kiss on the cheek. Movie-star face, I call it. She hardly ever does it, and only if I'm being nice.

”What was that for?”

”I don't know. For being that kid.”

The weeks pa.s.sed and the months pa.s.sed. The prototype sat in the garage. He'd moved it to the corner after we got back that afternoon, and covered it with a sheet. He and my mother started to fight more. My father continued to do his own research, on questions that got more and more specialized, and continued to publish his results in journals with t.i.tles more and more obscure. No one noticed anyway. That was the worst part: he understood that something was happening, that he was missing the big picture, even as he couldn't grasp exactly what it was or how or why. By the time I was twenty, a couple of years into college, I could already see him the way others did, I could switch between modes of viewing, sometimes as his son, other times not as his son but instead as someone looking at a prideful, intelligent, increasingly self-isolated man. A man drifting slowly into the past.

Then one day, he is back. It is a little more than three years after that day in the park. I hear him in the garage for hours, and into the night, and then every day for six weeks, the testing getting louder and louder. He is working on something else. Not a time machine. Something darker, more powerful. Science fiction, but not any kind I know of. He never asks me to come down there, never hints at what he is doing, although I know now that he was building the machine that would take him to that temple, and ultimately to wherever he is now.

In the garage, just where we had once built something together, now he is alone, building a different kind of box, one that will carry him away from us, from here, from this life.

TAMMY's crying again.

”Well that was a b.u.mmer,” I say.

”I thought we were supposed to feel better after that,” she says. ”Learn something about him.”

”I did,” I say. ”I understand that he left us. I understand about how much he cared for us, and it wasn't that much apparently.”

I ask TAMMY what would it even mean? To find my father at this point, what would that mean?

a.s.sume a Desired Event EVf (son finds father). (son finds father).

There are two predicates (Son, Father) but neither one is the crucial a.s.sumption. The questionable piece of this picture is the operator ”finds.”

Running that through the Symbolic Operator, we find that finds finds means at least the following: eye contact, discomfort, silence, at least one true thing said, at least one false thing said, at least one overly dramatic and egregiously, recklessly hurtful thing said, and some sort of closed boundary, partial or full, on the emotional asymptote toward parabolic melancholy. means at least the following: eye contact, discomfort, silence, at least one true thing said, at least one false thing said, at least one overly dramatic and egregiously, recklessly hurtful thing said, and some sort of closed boundary, partial or full, on the emotional asymptote toward parabolic melancholy.

The odds of such a finding occurring are, based on a.s.sumptions of the length of a life, the coefficient of conversational friction, the tensile strength of the fatherson dynamical social-psychological fabric, and the size of the window of comprehension and dramatic coherence, approximately one time per seventy-eight point three years, subjectively experienced.

A life is about twenty-five thousand days, and a finding occurs about once every twenty-five thousand days.

In other words, once in a lifetime.

In other other words, there is a single day, a single conversation, a single moment in my father's life that I need to find. One time in all of our times together when I can make contact with him, on our divergent, discursive, wandering paths through memory, past tense, narration, and meditation.

Time travel was supposed to be fun, it was supposed to be about going to places and having a bunch of adventures. Not hovering over scenes from your own life as a detached observer. Not just lurching around from moment to random moment, and never even learning about those moments.

And now we're faced with a new problem: we are running out of book. Which is to say, we're running out of fuel. This loop has a preset length. It already happened, and it happened the way it happened, and any moment now, I'm going to find myself going back to Hangar 157 to get myself shot in the stomach.

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