The Beautiful Miscellaneous Read online

  “Sixty-two days. The big slow spin,” Whit said with some nostalgia.

  “Can you explain what it is you do, Teresa?” Here was my father guiding the conversation away from Whit’s galactic adventure, a subject he and I knew would end in the closest thing to melancholy that Whit knew—a lament for the estranged wife who chose a “moon-lander” over him. My father and Whit had made a pact, I realized. No physics and no space stories.

  Teresa was deep in thought, staring at the swill of coffee in her mug. “Sometimes I see things. Bodies. What’s wrong with them,” she said.

  “It never ceases to amaze me,” Whit said. “The world’s talents. The guy who sacks your groceries is building a robot in his basement.”

  “I’m not a prodigy,” Teresa said. She looked him square in the eye.

  “I see,” Whit said.

  “It’s not like being talented at the piano or being able to memorize a page from a book. I’m being used as a channel.” There was something breezy in her voice.

  “This is precisely what I’m talking about,” my father said.

  “Interesting,” Whit said.

  There was an awkward silence for a moment and we all looked out the window. An old man was walking his dog. A family with four kids drifted out of a toy store.

  “Now,” my father said, “do you see the body as matter or do you see it as energy? Do you see bones, for instance?”

  The word bones was gray and brittle and textured like old cement.

  Fortunately, the waitress arrived with our food and said: “This ought to stick to your ribs.” I felt a gentle nudge under the table. I looked down and saw Teresa’s foot beside mine, waving at me. Yes, that’s my father, I thought. The waitress placed a six-stack of pancakes in front of Whit. He licked his lips like a cartoon fox. Whit could tuck a napkin into his shirtfront and get away with it, have people find it endearing. My father turned his plate around several times, waiting for his omelet to be in an agreeable position. I poured syrup onto my buttermilk pancakes. Teresa said to my father, “I see blood and bone. The organs all look different. The heart looks like a swollen hand.” It struck me that she didn’t like my father, that she wanted to pick a fight.

  My father considered her statement, glanced out the window while he chewed, then said, “It’s a little bit like seeing through a high-powered microscope. Skin, of course, is merely molecules—atoms stitched together. And atoms are full of empty space. We should probably all be able to see through it. If only we knew how.”

  “But you don’t know how,” Teresa said.

  “No,” said my father.

  “I don’t see through it exactly,” Teresa said. She drained her mug and looked around for the waitress. “I daydream of what’s inside. I close my eyes and this picture comes to me.”

  “I get it,” Whit said. “It’s like their bodies send you a little letter. Dear Teresa, I’m sick…”

  Teresa’s mouth opened, either in the after-bite of coffee or in sudden disgust at the reduction of her gift. “Sort of,” she said. “Mr. Nelson, do you believe in God?” My father stopped mid-bite; Pop Nelson had sent an emissary from the other side. He stroked his beard with three fingers, a little nervous.

  “What makes you ask that?” he said.

  “Because if you do, then you probably think that God is sending me those daydreams.”

  “He doesn’t believe in God,” I said.

  “I have moments where I think a creative consciousness must be out there,” my father said.

  “For my money, there’s got to be someone making the sandwiches for the picnic,” Whit said.

  “I don’t believe in God, either,” Teresa said. She took out her cigarettes and placed them on the table. My father looked at the cigarettes, then at me. Everyone finished eating and Teresa asked the waitress for an ashtray. The waitress was nonchalant. Teresa looked older than she was and this was a woman who, from the pallor of her skin and the breathiness of her speech, had probably started smoking before she’d turned twelve—a career smoker. My father watched, mesmerized, as Teresa lit the cigarette and sent a stream of smoke up the front window. The smoking, the reference to God—Pop Nelson was determined to linger for my father. We sat there awhile longer. Toby had barely spoken since we arrived. I saw his lips moving slightly; he was humming his own private music, ignoring all of us.

  My father and Whit stayed the rest of the day and left after dinner. Gillman and my father sipped cognac after dessert, discussing Bell’s theorem and its application for memory and genius. Whit wrestled with Dick and Cal Saunders out on the lawn. I didn’t smoke in the barn with Teresa. She had gone horseback riding by herself. I could tell she needed time alone. The price of medical intuition was a threshold with people, a nausea that rose when she couldn’t stand to be next to another human being for a moment longer. The dark river of blood, the shanks of diseased bone—these deprived her of endurance for friendship, for sustained contact; they gave her a bent for solitude, like a medieval saint who saves the sick and the lame, then wanders for weeks in the desert, attempting to be rid of their gratitude.

  twenty-eight

  My parents and Whit came the following weekend for the open house. On the Saturday, visitors arrived from all over the country to see the results of the institute’s program. People were awestruck as Roger gave a tour of his miniature city. Researchers and educators had a roundtable discussion with Gillman on socialization and education of the gifted. There was a luncheon with the current guests. Then, in the evening, there was the talent show.

  We all dressed up for the gathering except Teresa, who dressed in protest: ripped jeans and an old sweatshirt that warned PAIN IS NOT ENOUGH. She and I walked into the dining room, where the talent show was being held. I was wearing a dull and ill-fitting black suit my mother had found in my closet back in Wisconsin. We stood with my parents and Whit. My mother was dressed in a bottle-green frock with a Kashmiri shawl over her shoulders. She reached over and brushed some lint off my lapel. “Hey, little buddy,” Whit whispered to me. My father nodded at me bleakly. He looked pale and his eyes appeared sunken. “Migraine,” Whit said to me. My father shrugged, but irritation crept into his face.

  Teresa and I continued around the room, meeting people’s families. I looked for echoes between parent and child, relative and prodigy. Most of the time there was some physical resemblance—an inherited widow’s peak, a distinctive jawline—but they were faces developed in different worlds. The parents and family members were weighed down by what their lives demanded, by errands and mortgages. The gifted had wrinkle-free foreheads, supple skin, eyes that were clear and luminous. They’d been given a place to hide.

  Teresa introduced me to her parents. I was surprised they had come even though she wasn’t performing. “We like to get out of the house for these kinds of events,” Mr. Fenmore said. “I’m impressed by nature. That’s why we came.” He looked at me guardedly, shook my hand a little too tightly.

  “Teresa tells me you’ve got a killer memory,” he said, eyebrows raised. “I’ve got a good head for numbers.” Teresa had told me his biggest flaw was competitiveness. Once, he arm-wrestled a sick uncle at Thanksgiving after the man accused him of being a slouch.

  His wife straightened his tie. A woman who shopped in thrift stores and bought Christmas presents in August. She had a small gap between her front teeth, and as I watched her smile I thought this made her seem vulnerable. I don’t know why exactly, but it made me like Teresa more. Mr. Fenmore asked me where I was from.

  “Wisconsin,” I said.

  “Cheese.” He stared at the space in front of him.

  “Mosquitoes,” I said.

  “Heavens,” Mrs. Fenmore said. “If there’s one thing I dislike, it’s creepy-crawlies.” She gave a stage shudder.

  “My mother sprays insecticides under our beds. She poisons us,” Teresa said.

  The daughter and the parents looked at each other for a moment. There was a history of arguments, per
haps violent ones, in that pause. Teresa said that we had to go so I could prepare for my performance. I shook hands again with Mr. Fenmore and we left. Gillman smiled at us as he mingled with the guests. He was dressed in a woolen tuxedo and wore a name tag. He stood among a group of academics at the back of the dining hall, where some of Roger’s models had been assembled.

  When it was time for our performances, we all sat and Gillman addressed the audience. My parents were in the front and Whit stood with his arms folded at the back of the room. I was nervous at the thought of my father watching my recital. He sat waiting with his hands in his lap. Gillman gave a brief update on progress at the institute before introducing Toby. My roommate stood up from his chair and made his way to the upright piano without a cane. He’d counted the number of steps between his seat and the piano.

  He sat motionless, his tails draped over the piano bench, hands resting an inch above the keys. When he started playing, his fingers sprung open like startled spiders but he remained stone-faced, eyes closed, mouth tight, his foot tapping the pedal methodically. He punctuated each note precisely and the silences were notes played but not heard; he moved his fingers above the keyboard to measure the pauses, as if he were playing an octave outside our hearing. An inscrutable smile appeared during a change in pace. For a month he’d practiced with a tape of audience noises—muffled coughs, breathing, human whispers from concert halls. He’d ordered a tape from a company who sold these noises as sound effects to movie studios. Auditoriums full of nervous systems, irrepressible urges that came out under reverence and boredom. He’d tamed his stage fright, I thought. The polyrhythmic riffs, the delicate trills and hammered sixteenth notes came as a cascade of blue-white sparks.

  When the crowd applauded he stood and bowed three times, a hand resting at the piano. He came toward me, smiling.

  “Nice job,” I said.

  “That wasn’t me,” he said, “that was the Russian back from the dead.” He walked past me and held out a weary hand for someone to take.

  Next, Cal and Dick sat on bar stools and fielded questions about their ethanol combustion model, which no one seemed to understand except a mathematician from MIT who was nursing a sherry at the back of the room. After he’d asked a few esoteric questions, Dick and Cal said they’d answer any questions about math that people wanted to know. Mr. Fenmore raised his hand and asked them what zero multiplied by 1.6 billion was, to which Dick replied, “Congratulations, you have just asked the dumbest question in the history of decimalized mathematics. Zero is as zero does.” From the side of the room Gillman folded his arms disapprovingly.

  Next, my father raised his hand, blearing through his migraine, and asked, “Tell me, what is the square root of pi?” Cal and Dick looked at each other, then back at my father.

  “Sir, to how many decimal places?” Dick asked.

  “Twenty-five should do it,” my father said.

  In unison Dick and Cal said, “1.7724531023414977791280875.”

  My father produced a small pocket calculator, punched a few numbers, and said, “Very nice.”

  After several more questions the twins took their seats.

  Owen came out and was asked various calendar questions—what day of the week for distant Thanksgivings, Christmases, and New Year’s Days. Gillman sat with a perpetual calendar and confirmed his answers. Some of the occasional guests also made an appearance—a nine-year-old violin virtuoso, a man who gave a brief talk on his artificial intelligence system, a woman who spoke thirty languages fluently and translated between them for the crowd. I was the last to go up, and I believed on some level this was no coincidence.

  “Our next resident is Nathan Nelson,” Gillman said. “He’s very unusual because his phenomenal memory developed after a near-fatal car accident. In fact, Nathan left the living for a very brief time. When he returned, his brain developed synesthesia, a condition in which the senses blend together. This has allowed him to memorize large amounts of information. Lately, he’s turned his talents to history and poetry. Please give him a round of applause.”

  The audience clapped while I stood at the front. I looked at my parents and recalled the day of the seventh-grade science fair: Darius Kaplansky staring at the back of the index cards, my parents with proprietary smiles. They believed they were responsible for both my potential genius and mediocrity—it was their genealogy on the line. Now all that had changed. Something else was responsible for my gift. My father watched me intently. A probe inside a vacuum, the propagation of light in space, the relationship between energy, mass, and velocity—all these could be reduced to an equation, a formula. But this unknown radio frequency bothered him. Kept him awake at night.

  I stood with my hands by my side, my ill-fitting suit inching up my back, and looked out into the dining room, making eye contact with the faces. My mind went still, then blank. I mentally reached for sonnets and an outline of British colonialism, but there wasn’t a speck of information—not a colored line or bitter-tasting spiral. I stood there for an eternity. A murmur passed through the crowd. Doctor Gillman smiled politely and cleared his throat. I couldn’t look at my parents.

  Then, I found myself saying, “Well, Mr. Smart, this is the famous Hawaiian detective now serving with the San Francisco police force. Inspector Harry Hoo.” The words from a season-one episode of Get Smart came unbidden. Max has followed a KAOS agent to San Francisco and the agent has been murdered. Harry Hoo and Max discover the dead body and Max searches the corpse for clues.

  My father lifted his chin. I stood motionless. Nothing moved except my mouth as I described the action and recited the dialogue. “Max leans over, reappearing each time holding up an item. Max says, ‘Wallet…handkerchief…comb…keys to my apartment…’ Then Harry Hoo says, ‘One moment, Mr. Smart, victim had keys to your apartment in his pocket?’”

  I exhaled, losing the momentum of the approaching punch line. “‘Oh, you wanted me to search his pockets.’”

  I looked out into the audience. A volley of small laughter came from Owen’s family—barrel racers and antique dealers from Blue, Wyoming. This continued for about ten minutes until Gillman interrupted me and thanked everyone for coming. I didn’t get the chance to recite any of the closing credits: Joey Forman as Harry Hoo, or Leonard Strong as the Craw, a Chinese man with a magnet for a left hand. The Wyoming folks gave an encouraging cheer as Gillman ushered me back to my seat. Quietly, he said, “Very disappointing.” I tried not to look at him. My father sat on the other side of the room with his eyes on the floor. There was no point telling either of them that my brain had seized up onstage, that Get Smart came out on its own—the nervous scratch of a mnemonic mind. My father got up and came toward me, his walk slightly off balance.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  “A television show.”

  “This is the proof? Your time here amounts to this?” he said. One hand was at his temple. People walked away to stand in small groups. “You’re wasting everybody’s time.”

  He touched my head as if it were a tabletop, and I knocked his hand away. He glared at me.

  He said, “That mind wants structure, routine, do you understand me? I’m fed up. We brought you here to find your calling, Nathan.”

  I took a step back. “I was hit in the head. I died and came back different. That was my calling.”

  “This is your ticket, your invitation…You see things differently than other people. Like me. I know you do.”

  I said, “When I look up at the stars I don’t think about gases and molecules. Half the time I don’t even look up.”

  He grabbed my shoulders tightly and yelled into my face. “Stop squandering what you have! Do you hear me? Take your place!” The whole room turned and looked at us, stunned silent. Dr. Gillman guided some researchers out into the hallway. It was the first time I had ever heard my father yell. He recoiled and stammered, “I need to sit. I can feel my pulse in my thumbs.” He ambled back toward my mother, who appeared to be crying into
an embroidered handkerchief.

  I turned and headed for the back of the room. Some people had stayed for a small reception. The Saunders twins and their parents held court by a bowl of punch. The mother said to a stout man in a blazer, “Cal was late to toilet train and I think that’s significant.” Cal blinked at her and said, “Mother, drop dead, please .” Toby was talking to an elderly lady who kept clasping her hands and saying, “Inspirational playing!” I walked behind him and leaned to his ear. “She’s a hundred and eight, but she might give you a squeeze.” He shot out a laugh and the lady said, “Now, boys.” I was determined that my father’s outburst wouldn’t ruin my night.

  Whit looked over at me and I got his attention. He withdrew from a circle of parents and walked over to me, beer in hand.

  “Agent Eighty-six,” he said.

  “Can you get me a drink?”

  “You don’t mean apple juice, do you?”

  “One of those,” I said, pointing to his bottle.

  “Your mother will string me up. You’ve upset her.”

  “Please,” I said.

  He disappeared behind a row of people and returned with a beer bottle wrapped in a napkin. “Be discreet,” he said, leaving.

  From across the room my father looked my way but, because he was squinting with pain, I couldn’t tell if he’d noticed the beer bottle in my hand. He contemplated his Dixie cup of fruit punch.

  I continued through the crowd and found Teresa by the doorway, taking a slug from her hip flask.

  “Your dad might see,” I said.

  “He’s used to it. My mother’s a drunk.”

  “No way.”

  “Bottle of booze behind the fireplace logs. Her charity is an excuse to get bottles of cheap wine as tokens of appreciation.”

  “You want to go to the workshop?” I asked. She nodded, put her flask inside her sweatshirt, and we went out into the night. We stopped in front of the workshop. Teresa reached for the flashlight that was kept under a loose stone by the front door. As she leaned down, I stared at her back and shoulders. I asked myself, Is she my girlfriend? and thought, oddly, about the small gap between her mother’s teeth. Looking at Teresa, knowing that I was about to press against her, I felt as if I were stealing something from her parents. Taking something from the gum-chewing cop and the charity worker—why was that exciting? They were sipping punch while I was about to get breathless with their firstborn. I kissed the back of her neck.