The Beautiful Miscellaneous Read online

  I was a mildly precocious child, but my parents mistook two traits as signs of early genius: an ability to pose cutting questions, and a slightly better-than-average memory. The first trait was a kind of reflection of the world. Questions made me seem smarter than I was; they mirrored the minds of people around me. I asked my father things that sounded like Zen koans: “Why does it snow?” “Does the sun become a star at night?” “Why am I the only person I know who’s not afraid of Kodiak bears?” They seemed like signposts, telegrams from a vibrant, interior world. But, like most children, I had no sense of irony in my questions. The perfect answer to why it snows was “Because it gets cold.” The second trait—memory—convinced my parents I was unnaturally gifted. My father posted the periodic table on my bedroom door, hoping I would internalize the names and atomic weights. I remembered ten elements, in no particular order, and no atomic weights. I drew arrows connecting the ones that began with the same letter. It was pattern recognition, savvy, but nothing like genius.

  But my parents’ hope outweighed the evidence. A piano appeared in the parlor. My mother’s violin came down from the attic. She began leaving it in conspicuous places, casually at rest beside the fireplace, propped on a bookshelf, hoping that I would pick it up one day, take it back to my bedroom, and fill the house with heavenly stringed laments. But the violin sat in its case, marooned in the parlor, sinister as a baby’s coffin. I felt it waiting for me—the burnt-orange velvet swaying inside, the strings slackening against the bow. I could never bring myself to open the lid.

  By the time I was nine, I’d spent years at math competitions in high school gymnasiums, in chess tournaments at the scout hall, and in whiz-kid summer camps. The major events were filmed in sixteen-millimeter. My mother cooked my favorite food the night before a big event—lasagna with mashed potatoes. My father made me breakfasts of “brain food”—carrot juice and steak. It was a recipe that one of his colleagues from the physics department swore by. The taste of pan-fried steak and the juicy pulp of carrots signaled the start of so many days in which we tried to unearth my talents.

  During this quest my father discussed school as if it were a trifling formality that a genius-in-training must endure. “Jump through their hoops,” he said, “and I’ll teach you about reality at night.” “Reality” turned out to be basic algebra and the foundations of science. He taught me about gravity, motion, and light, about the conspiracies of molecules and atoms that held things in place. We looked at water drops and their animated worlds under a microscope. We collected pollen and watched ice crystals form. I imagined hydrogen and oxygen bonding, spinning toward each other, making water and ice some kind of chemical choreography. We talked about the sun burning helium and the moon governing tides; we coaxed electricity from a voltaic cell.

  When he thought I was ready, my father inducted me into the quantum universe. It seemed to contradict all the science I had learned so far: nothing was really held in place. The essential stuff of the universe was nonmatter, pulses of energy and information, flickering in and out of existence. Everything was up for grabs. A table, a chair was a fluid arrangement of probabilities. Sometimes I expected the uncertainty principle to kick in and find strangers masquerading as my parents, or that our house had been razed by some great atomic upheaval. It was about this time I started sleeping with the light on.

  MANY EVENINGS WERE DEVOTED TO math and science drills. We sat in the kitchen and my father wrote out simultaneous equations for me to solve. We plotted curves and functions on tablets of graph paper. My mother served us blueberry pie or crème brûlée or baklava. She sat in a wicker chair with a pencil and a New York Times crossword puzzle, whispering clues to herself. She was good at crosswords, knew a lot of arcane words garnered from a lifetime of reading, but sometimes, especially if she’d had a glass of wine, annoyance flushed her cheeks. “Good Lord, they expect a lot from a person.” My father and I would look up from our equation or graph. She would rock back and forth in her chair, indignant, while her hazel-flecked eyes and patrician features narrowed. I knew how she felt; most of the time my father wrote out problems that I could not solve on my own. One night, as we looked at her, she wrapped her long brown hair into a bun, stuck a No. 2 pencil into it, drained her wineglass, folded and refolded the newspaper, and said, “These tyrants! Fine. They want war. I’ll dig a trench and take aim. Go on with your numbers, boys.” After a glass of wine and an infuriating crossword clue, my mother could pass for Charlotte Brontë.

  Sometimes, when dessert was over, my father and I took a drive. We cruised the Oldsmobile through town and he drilled me on boiling points, formulas, and symbol names—scientific bric-a-brac. I sat up front on the crimson vinyl seat, my hands against the dash, imagining myself the copilot of specialized aircraft—Delta 10s, Apollo rockets, zeppelins—and I watched out the windshield as the headlights singled out trees and houses through a low fog or a summer haze. When I performed well, we circumnavigated the town only once—a slow, ten-mile loop bounded by the railroad, the subdivisions, and the college campus with its minarets and raised walkways. But if I did badly, erring on atomic numbers and evaporation temperatures, then we drove in endless concentric circles, narrowing in on downtown, the ground zero of failure. If I saw the stonework of the banks, the civic emblem on the town hall, I knew it was all over. Resigned, my father would turn for home and we would continue in silence, the car gliding along the empty streets with a maritime grace.

  One night I remember heading toward home, exasperated, brain-numbed, as we came into our neighborhood. Out my window I could see a row of six or seven neat houses where the men were out in their coats shoveling snow. My father slowed down and we surveyed the scene: the gleaming slow arcs of the snow shovels, the men hunched over the curbstone, their breath like smoke. A few of them clenched cigars or pipes between their teeth. An elderly neighbor stamped up and down, salting the sidewalk from a bucket. The men, settled in an after-dinner chore, a moment’s bracing contact with the elements, joked and called to one another as they worked. With their dun-and-ale-colored coats, peaked hats, and hooded faces, they appeared medieval—members of a fraternal guild plying their trade. And by comparison, I felt a strange sense of privilege and isolation from inside the car. My mother paid a man to clear our driveway of snow and ice. I’d never seen my father hold a shovel or a rake. I felt like the son of an industrialist, touring the proletariat, waltzing past the rowhouses and saltbox shacks of the poor. I didn’t like this feeling, so I wound down my window and waved at the men. A few of them waved back with big-mittened hands. They were normal people—car salesmen and restaurant owners—and a complete mystery to me. My father nodded and said quietly, “The endless battle.” I didn’t know whether he meant against snow or against some invisible, more defiant enemy. Up ahead I could make out our house. The Victorian roofline floated above the bare rim of the orchard, the stand of apple trees that buffered us from the rest of the street.

  five

  My parents sent me to St. John’s, a Catholic school run by Jesuit priests, even though my father was an atheist and my mother had grown up Methodist and was now agnostic. They sent me here because my father claimed that the Jesuits were great scholars. “Celibate men with lots of time on their hands, it speaks for itself,” he said. Father Clayton, the principal, had a PhD in chemistry, which won my father over instantly. As a condition of attending the school, I had to participate in its Catholic rituals—scripture classes, Wednesday mass, confession—and this made my father nervous. “Ignore the applied science in the Bible,” he told me. “Combusting bushes, men living to nine hundred, ghosts impregnating virgins. Not even quantum physics can explain those things.”

  My mother liked the school because it fit with her sense of tradition, seemed part of a distant era of superior manners and grooming. In our parlor, an entire wall hung with sepia photographs: picnicking families on sunny lawns, suited uncles rowing wooden boats beneath their wide-brimmed hats, a picture of her parents—a
bearded, stalwart minister with piercing eyes and a woman in a lace-trimmed dress with a kind, open face. That wall had the air of a family shrine, of paying homage to our ancestors who, in the days of rheumatic fever and typhoid, were the last of a happy generation.

  My mother felt a longing for the past. Sometimes she sat on the landing above the stairs and told me about childhood summers in our house. Aunt Beulah—originally from Vermont, where an apple farmer betrayed her in love—scrubbed creosote from the fireplace, dug her own pantry cave with a pickax, and canned the world one fruit at a time. Beulah was from a generation of spinsters who whistled while plucking a hand-wrung chicken and took a glass of rum and seltzer every night before bed. Every day was set to a domestic rhythm—wash day, canning day, baking day—and all of them filled with Beulah’s quips and jokes, muttered folk songs and country sayings. It was little wonder, then, that my mother had inherited some antiquated ways of speaking and kept house on a military schedule. Even when she deviated from Beulah’s homespun rigors—putting up a Kashmiri tapestry or a Turkish prayer rug—she had merely supplanted one set of traditions for another. All her ethnic jewelry and artifacts tended to be antiques, lifted stories from the past. I suppose now that St. John’s was just another relic and therefore a comfort to her.

  In school I applied myself and went along with the search for my endowment. Because I had a good memory I did reasonably well. I worked hard and stayed patient, even though I got bored of the constant drills and quizzes and extracurricular trials. I believed the hand of greatness was above me, waiting to cup my skull in a benevolent embrace. Wednesday afternoons I attended the Young Chemists’ Club, where eight other boys and I listened to Father Clayton talk about noble gases, about the formation of coal, about peat forming inside bedrock over millions of years. We made acids and alkaline solutions; we learned the names for chemicals and elements. During Friday lunchtimes I went to the geography brownbag lunch. Over peanut butter sandwiches and celery sticks I watched as Father Dustoyov, a Russian émigré, pulled down maps of Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, revealing the swaths of pale pink and ink blue that stood for nation-states. He pointed to the amorphous blob of fuchsia that marked the Soviet Union, noting simply, “I am from this ocean of pink, right here.” Every week he gave us a quiz on Eastern Bloc cities; I took some pride in knowing we were the only kids in America who knew that the Baltic Sea, like Michigan, resembles a raised hand.

  Through all this I believed genius was a job you grew up to perform, no different, essentially, than becoming a fireman, a doctor, or a jeweler. Geniuses were small-framed men, bespectacled and loping; they had bad taste in shoes, were prone to gravy stains and tweed. But these men—and they were always men—were also unpredictable: it was just as likely for their throat-creaking speculation to result in a torrential belch as it was in a new system of fuel combustion. A genius wasn’t something you were or weren’t, so much as something, with the right training and parentage, you could become.

  FOR MY TENTH BIRTHDAY MY father took me on a surprise trip. He woke me early one morning, handed me the clothes my mother had laid out on the bed, and we drove for an hour in light snow before stopping for breakfast. Over oatmeal, my father said, “Happy birthday, Nathan. This is going to be a big surprise.” His tone was secretive. My chest tightened. I pictured arctic tundra, some sky watch over an ice field.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  He smiled and said, “You won’t believe it.”

  We drove to the Madison airport. I had never been on a plane before and had only been inside an airport a few times. A cold, white light hung at the windows while businessmen sat leafing through newspapers. A woman’s voice droned departure warnings on the PA system. A platoon of nuns stood in their habits, drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups. There was something morbid about the grim men in suits, about the brightly clad families returning from Hawaii with suntans in the dead of winter. I could feel a hollow sensation in my stomach. I stood by the windows and watched jets land and take off, the de-icing of their wings, while my father settled at the end of a row of plastic seats and wrote in a notebook.

  As we lined up to board our plane, I looked over at the ticket desk, where a uniformed man announced that our destination was San Francisco. I knew this was in California. I also knew Disneyland was in California, though I wasn’t sure in which city. The likelihood of my father taking me to Disneyland seemed so remote that I didn’t allow myself to get excited. But then, on the plane, amid the humming turbines and the metallic-smelling air, my father said things that suggested we would spend the day at a giant amusement park.

  “This place is a tribute to physics,” he said, rotating a bony finger in the air. I pictured octopus rides and Ferris wheels, odes to centrifugal motion.

  “Speed, motion, light. Everything you could want in one place. Makes me feel like a boy again.” He pointed with his fork at his in-flight meal, as if it were a scale model of where we were going. Gesturing to one end of his turkey sandwich, he said, “The mountains sit here, watching the whole show in silence.” I allowed my muscles to relax. Someone had told my father to take me to Disneyland and he’d found a way to tie it in with my scientific education. I pushed my food tray aside and looked out the window. I stared at the streaming clouds, riveted now by the thought of traveling across the continent at four hundred miles an hour.

  When we landed in San Francisco, we rented a car and traveled half an hour. California was sunny and bright. It was everything I needed it to be. We drove along the freeway, my father gunning the engine whenever he passed slower drivers. I saw the mountains and guessed we were getting close. My father slowed and pulled off onto the shoulder. We got out and stood on the edge of the freeway, long-distance trucks hauling past us to Seattle and Portland, commuters flashing by. We walked a little ways and stood on an overpass. Fifteen feet or so below us there was a two-mile-long structure that resembled the boxcars of an enormous freight train. It ran through a ravine, between stands of scrub oak and manzanita. I stared down at the tunnel.

  “What do you think?” he asked, one hand combing his beard.

  “What is it?”

  “Particle accelerator.”

  I could feel my hands curl into fists. “A what?”

  “The Stanford Linear Accelerator. It’s an atom smasher.” He leaned against the guardrail and pointed up toward the Santa Cruz Mountains. I hated him in that moment and could imagine pushing him over the side. I was suddenly very thirsty and had to keep swallowing. My father said, “The electrons start their dash up toward the base of the mountains. Just near the San Andreas Fault, which I think is fitting. Anyway, they’re accelerated inside a long copper tube buried underground. The superstructure houses the klystrons that feed microwave power to the tube.”

  I said nothing.

  He grinned. “A pulse of electrons rides the electromagnetic wave at close to the speed of light. A couple microseconds later each electron has gained upward of twenty billion volts.” He paused, took out the small notebook he kept in his top pocket, feinted with his pen as if about to write a remarkable insight, then put it away again. Finally he stared back at the tunnel and said, “Twenty billion volts. You could light a few porches with that kind of energy.” He abruptly stepped back toward the car and I followed. I was mad with myself for getting excited. We drove down to the accelerator campus and I couldn’t look at my father.

  But as we entered the compound, my mood changed. We checked in with a mustached security guard at the main gatehouse and were issued visitor badges. We pulled past the checkpoint and stopped in a parking lot outside an administrative building. As we walked toward the drab, squat building, a middle-aged man with a red tie and enormous sideburns came out to meet us. He greeted my father with an earnest handshake.

  “Dr. Nelson, we’re so delighted to have you back.” The man placed his other hand over the handshake like a protective seal. I’d never seen this before, nor had I ever heard my father be called
Doctor.

  “This is my son, Nathan,” my father said. “Nathan, this is the director of the accelerator, Dr. Benson.” The man bowed forward a little and held his big, blotchy hand in front of me. “Delighted,” he said. I shook his hand. It was warm and sweaty. “A little chip off the old block is what we have here,” he said to my father. At ten, I already had my father’s tall, lanky build and his dark, unruly hair. I suddenly realized, with some embarrassment, that my father and I were wearing identical powder-blue oxfords.

  “It’s Nathan’s birthday,” my father said.

  Dr. Benson said, “Of course. I remember from our telephone conversation. Please, bring the birthday boy inside. We’ll head down to the control room in just a little while.” He stepped aside and delivered a small flourish with his hands. We entered a long white corridor broken here and there by office doors, notice boards, and wooden mailboxes. After about thirty feet or so we stepped inside an alcove and Dr. Benson, now rummaging through the pockets of his corduroy trousers, gestured to a vending machine. “Perhaps Nathan would care for a soda,” he said.

  My father looked at me and I shrugged. “By all means,” my father said. “Sprite is the beverage of choice, I believe.”

  “Coke,” I corrected.

  Dr. Benson inserted a quarter and handed me a can of Coke. It was extremely cold and I pictured liquid nitrogen smoking inside the vending machine. I took a long sip and we continued down the corridor. We stopped by Dr. Benson’s disheveled office, where he collected the car keys for a Department of Energy van from under a pile of papers.

  We drove in a white government-issue van down to the main control room, where we would spend the day. I learned that this was where my father had started coming several times a year. He was working on some experiments aimed at finding what he called the ghost particle. A discovery that would extend the standard model of subatomic physics. He and some colleagues from a large international collaboration fired electron pulses at targets of hydrogen and waited to see if anything new was deflected. The collisions happened at close to the speed of light and might create, for a nanosecond, a particle that did not ordinarily exist in nature.