The Beautiful Miscellaneous Read online

  “Nice story.”

  “I need to sleep.”

  She gestured to her pillows and we put our heads down.

  After a moment she said, “Personally, I want a sea burial. Fish food. A platform for kelp. Am I being morbid again?”

  “Yeah, but that’s okay. I’ve come to appreciate your attitude toward death.”

  We lay there for a long time, fully clothed, trying to sleep.

  THE NEXT MORNING I PASSED the room Arlen slept in when he came to stay. He appeared in his doorway with the paranoid aspect of a dachshund.

  “I dreamed about your old man, Nathan. He was in some kind of a tunnel.”

  I stopped dead, leaned against the door frame.

  “It was a very long tunnel. I don’t know where it was, but there were mountains.”

  He gestured for me to come inside. His room was sparse and he’d placed his mattress on the floor. His face was stubbled, but he’d shaved an irregular path around his mouth that, strangely, reminded me of a crop circle. Of course he was referring to the linear accelerator. If my father had a ghost, that’s where it was going to inhabit—early mornings hauling above the electron shoot with Dr. Benson.

  “Did he say anything to you?” I asked.

  “To me? No. But he was talking to himself, you know, the way homeless people do sometimes. The crazies on the subway.”

  “Did you hear what he was saying?”

  “Warm drink? I was going to heat myself some milk. Dr. Gillman lets me have a little burner in here.”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  Arlen turned his back to me and walked to the corner of the room. He poured some milk into an aluminum pan. He set the pan on a small range and began stirring it with a wooden spoon.

  “I love a good glass of bovine lactation,” he said.

  “Did my father say anything that you heard?”

  “Not really. It was kind of noisy in that tunnel. Would you like some yogurt? I just bought some at the store. Acidophilus is a bitch of a word. What do you reckon about that word, Nathan? I understand from certain rumors and whispers that you have a thing for words.”

  “They stick in my head.”

  He stirred the milk for another minute before pouring a dash of whisky into it. He came and sat down beneath a corkboard where various items were pinned—photos of children, ragged clothing and underwear, plastic figurines. I sat down in a chair.

  “What else, Arlen? Anything you—” My voice broke off. “Do you have anything that belonged to him?”

  I held up my wrist, indicating the watch.

  “Hand me that,” he said.

  I undid the band and passed it to him. Arlen took it and put it into the pocket of his bathrobe. He blew across the top of his milk.

  “No, I need that. You can’t hold on to it,” I said.

  “Normally they give me things.” He squeezed his eyes shut, indicating some gross violation of protocol.

  “You can’t have that,” I said.

  “I put them under my pillow. People’s thoughts get into things. You’d be surprised.”

  “I want to keep wearing it. Could you take a look now and see if there’s—”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of small objects—a yo-yo, a set of car keys, a large fingernail, and the watch. He singled out the wristwatch and brought it to his nose. He closed his eyes.

  “Nothing,” he said. “He wore Old Spice. That’s the revelation.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “In the dream, I also saw a hand writing some kind of letter. Did he write you any letters before he died?”

  “No.”

  Arlen studied the watchband. He retrieved a single hair from the weave of the band. “Is this yours or his?”

  It was one of my father’s wiry wrist hairs. “I think it’s his,” I said.

  “Can I have this?” he asked.

  “What for?”

  “It’s a piece of his body, isn’t it? The human body is a hologram. The entire psychic blueprint is contained in a single cell, a toenail, an eyelash, a milligram of saliva. You give me a man’s pinkie finger or a swab of urine, doesn’t much matter to me.”

  “Will you study it?” I asked.

  “Problem is I lose shit all the time. Nebraska troopers sent me some dead guy’s razor, whiskers and all, even a speck of blood, and I’ll be damned if I can find it.” He surveyed the room with an odd mixture of pride and remorse.

  I said, “You could develop a better system to keep track.”

  “A better system, you say? System is people die, naturally and otherwise, SOS messages sometimes blown through the air, sometimes I hear and smell and sometimes nothing. System is my life sucks; the dead are the boringest mother-fuckers to ever chirp their thoughts. I walk through Wal-greens and I go into the aisle with all the nose sprays, the decongestants, the zit creams and the inhalants, the corn and hemorrhoid suppressants, the artificial tears, the potions, and I think, we’re leasing these bodies from death. You know what the highlight of my life is, Nathan?”

  “No.”

  “Full-cream yogurt and single-malt whisky.”

  “I see.” I wanted to leave the room.

  Arlen nodded extravagantly and dabbed some milk from his top lip with a white handkerchief. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll attach this wrist hair to some clear tape and put it on my headboard. If that hair starts talking to me I’ll let you know.” He took a last smell of the watch and handed it back to me. “They say I’m losing my gift. Last few times I’ve fucked up royally. A refrigerator in a ditch instead of a woman’s body. You’d be surprised how similar moldy cheese and a rotting brain can be.”

  “I need to go.” I stood to leave.

  “Remember something about the dead: only the troubled ones still bother to reach out. The rest of them are tightlipped sons of bitches.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I said, walking out into the hallway.

  thirty-four

  My mother phoned me that same night to tell me that notices from college admissions offices had arrived. I asked her to open them and read me the results over the phone. I had only been accepted to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. It was less than eighty miles from our house. She said, “My alma mater. You’ll love it there.” But I could tell she was also surprised and disappointed that none of the other schools had found a place for me. I felt an old, familiar ache in my stomach.

  Despondent, I spent my last two weeks at the institute with Teresa and Toby. Teresa and I attempted to rekindle our barn rituals—recline amid the bluish tint of cigarette smoke and the metallic sheen of gin. But we barely kissed. Long silences uncoiled through the barn, making us both nervous. The end of our time together seemed to hang in the air.

  “We’re not good for each other,” she said one night.

  Her fingers were jaundiced with nicotine. My hair was unwashed.

  “Who is?” I asked.

  “Nobody I know. My parents write summaries of their arguments on legal pads and file them by subject.”

  “No.”

  “Just about.”

  “My grandfather used to throw soupspoons at my father,” I offered.

  “Nice little family you have there.” She blew a river of smoke at me.

  “He should have thrown silverware at me. I was the fuckup,” I said.

  “Please. Once I didn’t tell my dad he had a slipped disk. He just thought he’d slept badly—he was in agony. What kind of person?”

  “A girl who gets bored of seeing everything that’s broken,” I said.

  “I should put that on my headstone.” She smiled and took my hand in her lap. “I wish you could come with me.” In a few weeks she was leaving the institute to work part-time at a hospital in Connecticut.

  “Me, too,” I said. But I also knew I had no place in her new life in Connecticut. I was waiting for the next thing to happen and wasn’t even sure I would go to Madison in the fall. I felt as if I’d run aground.


  “Can we just lie in here for a while?” I asked. “We don’t have to talk.”

  She nodded. “Talking is overrated,” she said. She finished her cigarette and we lay back on the bed of straw.

  TOBY WAS GOING TO STAY another three months at the institute thanks to some music funding from Sony. He had been accepted into the Juilliard music program for the fall. He and I went driving in the Oldsmobile after midnight. We headed out onto the farmhand roads, the detours and back roads of Iowa grain farmers, going eighty miles an hour, listening to classical FM radio, Toby nodding and swaying like a Pentecostal, me with a hand outside the window, trailing it in the night air.

  In my absence he’d had a brief encounter with Susan, an artist from Maine.

  “It is not considered statutory rape if I’m over sixteen,” he said.

  “Did you actually penetrate?” I hoped they hadn’t had sex; losing my virginity seemed like another thing I had failed at.

  “I can’t be sure.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Little wooden houses, camped among the trees, streaked past our headlights.

  “I think you would know,” I said.

  “Sex for blind people is blurry around the edges,” he said.

  It was raining. We were on a patch of sealed road and the tires felt adrift, hydroplaned. I started to slow and Toby reached across and put a hand on the wheel.

  “I’ll steer and you tell me if I’m crooked,” he said.

  We’d had a beer each, but neither of us was anything like drunk. I kept my hands an inch above his at first, waiting to clutch the wheel. The road changed. We were doing sixty now, on gravel and washboard.

  He licked his top lip. “I can feel the bolts on the wheels shaking,” he said.

  “Keep her steady, but not tight. You can probably hear from the tires if we start to go off to the side.”

  “Of course it would be too late then,” he said.

  I lifted my foot slightly off the accelerator.

  He said, “Stay at this speed. This is something like fun.”

  We drove like that for a few minutes, down a stretch of farm frontage, the engine noise rising over soybean fields, now and then a light appearing from behind a kitchen window. We stopped at a T intersection and Toby grinned.

  “Let’s go into town,” he said. “I’m feeling ballsy, like I could take on the small-town constabulary.”

  We drove into downtown Selby. At night the row of banks and municipal buildings sat solemnly, stone crypts under yellow cones of streetlight. We rounded the block and now the street was dark except for a desolate all-night Laundromat that was lit like an operating room. As we waited at one of Selby’s dozen stoplights, I looked into the whiteness of the Laundromat and saw a middle-aged man standing before a dryer, waiting to retrieve his clothes. Something I hadn’t remembered in a long time stormed through my head: a night with my father from when I was about seven.

  We were walking home from his college physics lab, where he’d taken me to see a cloud chamber. I’d commented that it looked like a fish tank with rain inside—another failed subatomic exaltation. It was a cold night but we were bundled in coats, shouldering into a headwind and enjoying the walk through the commercial center of my hometown. He was deep into a rant about white-hot stars and evolution. Suddenly he stopped speaking and I turned to see that he was standing in front of the Laundromat window. Inside, a bald-headed man in a mustard-colored bathrobe stood waiting for his clothes to dry. A wall of empty dryers—portholes into a black sea—then this single whirl of flecked cloth, reds and blues and tans chasing one another in endless circles. The door to the Laundromat was ajar and we could hear a metallic click, a brass button or a forgotten stray penny, plinking against the barrel of the dryer. We watched as the man, not much more than a ponderous, shiny head above a tatty robe, placed a palm against the dryer door, feeling its warmth. After a moment the man looked toward the window, then took his hand from the round door and waved it at us. My father reeled, grabbed my shoulder, and backed away from the window. He looked away down the street, wincing, as if he’d witnessed a death-camp scene, something debased and horrifying. He began walking and I followed at his side. Quietly, he said, “If we’re not careful life becomes very small.” We walked the rest of the way home in silence.

  The light changed and I pulled away, still staring at the man in the Laundromat. I rolled the window down farther and touched the side of the car—the metal skin sheathed in moisture.

  Toby said, “Why don’t you come to New York with me? We could get an apartment together and date twin sisters who work at the Met.”

  “What would I do out there?”

  “What are you going to do anywhere?”

  I thought about Whit’s emergency kit in the trunk of the Oldsmobile; it was comforting to know it was there—the flares and the space blanket, the fierce halogen flashlight.

  Toby said, “You do what you want. But it’s an open invitation to come and live in New York. What the hell else are you going to do?”

  “Who knows,” I said.

  “How about night shift in a factory, or sweeping up old men’s hair in a barbershop? I have visions of you in an apron.”

  I played with the radio and found a riff of staticky jazz. “Could the apron be monogrammed? Or is that too flashy?”

  “You worry me,” he said definitively.

  I thought now that my father had probably wanted to scream at people—that moribund man in the Laundromat, Pop Nelson, lonely men he associated with soup cans and newspapers, with artifacts of despair. These were the things he’d craved near the end, but before that, before the deathly bloom of the tumor, he’d wanted to scream, Come out here, you old farts, and look up at the nebula, study the goddamned stars! He’d surely wanted to scream at me a dozen times.

  the highest scientifically measured scream was by neil stephenson of newcastle upon tyne england on may 18 1985

  We got on the gravel road that led to the institute. Toby turned the radio off and said, “Actual penetration I can’t be positive about. But it felt a lot like I imagine it. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  ON MY LAST DAY AT the institute there was an awards ceremony where Teresa, Toby, Dick, Cal, and I received certificates of achievement. We would be receiving our official high school diplomas in the mail some weeks later. Dick and Cal had sold their ethanol process to the U.S. government and had been offered jobs with an energy research company. My mother arrived that morning with Whit. She announced that she had gotten me a summer job at our hometown library. I would work as a page—someone who shelves books, types catalog index cards, and performs other menial tasks. The library was turn of the century, masonry and blown lights, tall windows, and I pictured myself pushing a laden cart through the stacks, amid the book-cloth greens and worn reds. There was something comforting about the simplicity of this job.

  Whit sat beside my mother during the awards ceremony and the picnic out on the lawn. He was still in his chivalrous persona, side-mouthing concerned comments, touching the edges of her primrose cardigan. I couldn’t shrug the feeling that something was happening between Whit and my mother. As I crossed the lawn to receive my certificate I smiled at my mother, who was taking a photo of me. The sixteen-millimeter camera had long since been retired. She looked younger, a scarf around her throat, a hat that was smart and understated at the same time, her clothes plain and neat, everything tucked and trimmed. She was largely giving up on ethnic apparel. She had the intrepid and kind aspect of a nun who’s worked in far-flung orphanages her whole life. I came and sat with her and Whit.

  “Congratulations,” she said.

  “He’d be proud,” Whit said.

  This caught me a little off guard. “No, he wouldn’t be,” I said. “He’d be making squiggles on the tops of his shoes and picking his nose when he thought no one was looking.”

  Whit affected a smile. My mother crossed her arms and looked back toward the stage, where Teresa was
walking toward Gillman. Gillman handed her the certificate and she tucked it under her arm. Dick and Cal and a boy I didn’t know wowed and whistled. When it was Toby’s turn to walk across the stage he sauntered across it, flexing his hands like a boxer. He had obviously walked the stage before, practiced and counted the number of steps, because he strode and stood exactly an arm’s length from Gillman’s podium. They shook hands and Toby took the award and descended the stairs, smiling wildly.

  There was a reception after the ceremony. Picnic tables arranged on the cropped lawn, cut sandwiches and soda and potato chips, checkered tablecloths—it had the air of a family reunion. Gillman sliced and distributed a giant cake. Whit hovered by the food table while my mother took snapshots of random things—the knife descending into the cake, a stray balloon lifting into the sky—as if she were struck nostalgic, trying to capture anything that moved for posterity. Gillman lifted his glass of apple juice and made a toast. “To talent made useful,” he said.

  I went and stood beside my mother, who was about to take a photo of the empty stage.

  “Don’t photograph that, please,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “The idea is to photograph people, not things. It’s some wood nailed together.”

  She nodded, conceded my point, and put the compact camera back in her purse.