Strange and Charm by Jeff Scheidel

Chicago NELSON ALGREN SHORT Tribune STORY PRIZE FINALIST 2011 Strange and Charm By Jeff Scheidel

ince they took my license away, I’ve gotten very good with bus schedules. They tend to scare the hell out of people who aren’t used to them, mostly because of transfers, but necessity is the mother of transportation. It’s a long way to go today, and I’ve only ever walked that far when my regulator was busted, and then I never get anyplace I aimed for anyway. I tend to end up in somebody’s backyard, or lobby, or someplace else I’m not welcome. Today,S my regulator’s working pretty well, and I have a specific goal in mind. Pointing one- self at an objective and following the rules, this is the way to avoid a random collision with the universe. I’m no stranger to public transportation. When I lived in the suburbs, I took the train regularly, but trains are easy, as they’re very linear. They show up at a certain time, they go in one direction, and you get off when they call your stop, usually close to on schedule. Today I’m on the Number Fourteen, which I will take to its northernmost point, before transferring to the Number Seven, which is fortuitous in that it’s a prime number. Primes used to be very important to me, when the details of my profession required them as razors for my calculations. Punctuality is paramount these days. Being late for a hearing just gives Dad and the state another excuse. But at least this one is academic, rather than legal. Intense self-disci- pline, along with a daily massive intake of valproic acid, have helped me keep these events out of court. If I’m to remain in total control of my affairs, I need to show progress. I can practically taste it. Thomas Edison once said “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” Of course, this is also what keeps red- necks sitting at the same slot machine for hours at a time. I keep looking out the window. I very much need to watch the stops, and make the correct exchange of my body from one vehicle to the next. My judgment must be perfect. In one of the several facilities where I’ve resided these last few years, I met a guy with dyspraxia, something I had not heard of until then. This bad piece of wiring, which he in-

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herited rather than gave to himself, means that he can’t judge distances. Literally, he can’t fill a glass of milk, or fit clothes in a drawer. This makes it dangerous for him to drive, or even cross the street, and sometimes to even put one foot in front of the other, especially on a flight of stairs. The obvious hazard is the potential for colliding with things. For this high crime, he has been occasionally institutionalized. My problem is not distances, and yet I still perpetually face the hazard of colliding with things. There’s virtually no chance of being committed again. I’m not violent, not a danger to myself, certainly no menace to family or friends. I know, I know, the pieces aren’t all there, at least not all the time. Even on increasingly stronger doses, sometimes the spot where I’m sitting doesn’t connect all the way over there, across the room. Before the state intervened, there used to be entire-family types of events, where everybody would convene and discuss my situation, my actions, the consequences, the course of action. I remember one October, sitting there in the kitchen, seemingly invisible as Dad and Uncle Clint and Aunt Vivian and cousin Trent talked about me like I wasn’t there. I barely was, I will say, since I’d come home from the facility half in the bag with whatever they’d injected into my thigh. “This is butt-ugly. I mean, hell, this must be the second or third worst thing he’s ever done.” “He’s done something worse?” “Don’t ask.” Only Marie, my beautiful, wonderful sister, ever spoke to me directly about any of this. She would ask me how I felt, what I needed, what I thought should be done. To everyone else, I was not to be consulted. But now I consult myself. I’m all I have. I’m trying to read the paperwork on the way, but it’s too bright today, and my floaters keep getting in the way. They only really come out in the light. They’re dancing across the page, blending in with the words. When I’ve described them to people, even those close to me, they think it’s just another symptom of whatever’s crawling around in my head. But they are most definitely real. One of them, in my right eye, is so large, and so detailed, I’ve been able to make out a face. I’ve named it Hugo. Most people can never get a good look at theirs, but every time I move my head quickly to the left, Hugo and his little friends wash across my vision. It’s one of the reasons I gave up on playing with my little microscope years ago. When I first go to focus it, the reflection off the mirror at the bottom tends to light up those float-

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ers, with all their hideous shapes, their twists and curves. When I’ve talked kiddingly of Hugo, I’ve gotten these reactions as if I’ve got an imaginary friend. I always try explaining, it’s just a thing in my eye. “Oh, so you’re seeing things, too,” they say. No no, I insist, but I haven’t been able to convince anybody of anything for years. The paperwork is fairly clear. It was written in such a way that even humans can understand it. Essentially, if I’ve been good, and prove it, if I haven’t tripped over anything, I can go on doing my thing. Otherwise, I could end up in a downstate facility this time. But I’ve been clear enough to manage for months now. No issues. I’ve always been good at discerning the meaning of the written page. A sound knowl- edge of Latin and Greek roots has allowed me to decipher twenty-five cent words. And wading through legalese simply entails breaking it down into components. Plus, I’ve had to deal with so many legal papers, because of this whole ordeal, because of Janine, because of the various scrapes I’ve been in, that it’s old hat. I didn’t start out in physics, although it suited me well enough. I’m a detail-oriented person, and it’s a very detail-oriented profession. All the figures are right there on the page. But when they start crawling off the page and up your arm and whispering into your ear, people notice.

started out as an English major. I always loved reading, as well as writing. I collected books of short stories and poetry. I still do. I I didn’t tell Dad about my chosen path right off, and fibbed that I was just taking the general requirements while I figured out my future. I knew full well what he would say. When I finally declared, he was predictably to the point. “First off, Junior,” he intoned before the entire clan, including Marie, Uncle Clint, and cousin Trent, “it’s a cab-driving degree. How you gonna support yourself? You know how little teachers make? In the old days, people paid off the schoolmarm with live chickens. It’s barely better to this day.” I simply nodded. It was the only way to deal with him. It’s barely better to this day. “Second, I know why you’re doing this. You’ve always gotten sticky over poetry. Your preening little buddy Eric, the one who doesn’t like girls, he’s a poet, right?” “I like girls, Dad. Don’t sweat it. That’s not going to change.” “How about your cousin Karl? He’s doing pretty good.” “Uh … he’s a repo man, Dad,” I pointed out. “He steals cars back from deadbeats.” “But he makes a good buck. I hear he’s the top guy in his outfit.”

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“I guess. But isn’t that like saying he’s the prettiest of the Three Stooges?” “Always, always you gotta be a rebel,” he insisted. “Twelve highlanders and a bagpipe make a rebellion,” I quoted some long-dead Scots- man, for no reason other than one of Dad’s words had collided with a buried memory. Shaking his head, Dad would have none of it. “You’ll be a cab-driving girlie man. Can’t have it. Can’t have it,” he concluded. “You always had such a head for math. Can’t you do something with that?” And with that, he left the room. Mom and Marie consoled me, telling me not to worry about it. And still. I absolutely hated admitting it … but he implanted in me the germ of uncertainty. Not about liking girls. But about supporting myself. I’d already had concerns, but now I had the worse condition: second-guessing myself. Siddhartha Gautama said, there is nothing more dreadful than the habit of doubt. I understand this completely. All those many years, I doubted nothing, despite being told how much others doubted me. By osmosis, I have come to doubt so very, very much. Doubt claimed me thoroughly near the end of freshman year, when an English teacher from the high school indeed came to speak to the class on Career Day, in his worn-out tweed jacket and scuffed shoes. Dedicated he was, and passionate and, yes, poor. I was mi- noring in math already, and doing fairly well grade-wise, plus there’s so much overlap with physics, that I sort of fell into it. And so, in achieving my secondary goal of being able to feed myself after college, I stripped away one of my true loves. I began persisting in con- vincing myself that I truly loved the mysteries of the universe. I memorized the formulae, I conducted experiments in which I measured the velocity of objects falling off the edge of a tall place, I examined the wavelength of the light that made my increasingly apparent floaters appear to me in my waking hours. Antoine de Saint Exupery, who wrote The Little Prince, once said, “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.“ In my case, this means I’ll be perfect when there’s so little remaining that I won’t have a head to put a hat on.

he universe is said by many to be the work of the WatchMaker. It was constructed, put in place, with all the gears set in motion, and the only mystery is that we don’t Tunderstand the inner workings yet. Men of science are supposed to think this way. But as an observer of circumstances and a gatherer of empirical data, I also see that there

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are a lot of random accidents. Things sometimes just happen, as consequences of those variations of the rules that we just haven’t mapped out yet. My own faulty wiring, and my subsequent collisions with the universe, are examples of that very happenstance. Hence, today’s hearing. The bulk of my job, when I still worked in the field of physics, had to do with collisions. In the auto industry, they stick dummies in cars and plow them into the wall, observe the effects, then build better cars. In our case, what we built was better models of the cosmos. The Unknown is often referred to as a Black Box. Until we know what’s in it and how it works, the gears and levers and valves, we can’t reliably predict what will come out of it. We still don’t have a unified theory to utterly marry the fundamental forces and elementary particles. There is no clear view of the workings of the Black Box. One of the ways we discern its contents is to take apart its building blocks. And one of the ways we do that is to crash those building blocks into each other, within the confines of a magnetized tunnel, and examine the wreckage. So this is what I did, for a number of years, working on the Collider. I had come into the field at the tail end of the Strategic Defense Initiative, when its critics were screaming “I told you so,” and its proponents were finally admitting what they already knew: the damn thing would never, ever work, and we’d never, ever be able to zap missiles out of the sky with lasers. But through school, I knew Eric, whose father knew Dennis, and Dennis was in charge of one of the two computer systems that ran the formulae that attempted to predict the results of the head-on crashes between particles. I became a low-paid intern who managed to stick after a summer of subsequent cuts because I could program in Fortran and C++. The computer was called the Meat Grinder, since it ate up the figures we fed it, and spit out the results which in turn fed the settings on the collider. The universe was good to me then. I had a great job. I had a way with numbers, and the ability to get them in and out of the computer with predictability. I had a great boss in Dennis, who liked my numbers. I had a lovely wife who liked something about me, and I wish I could have figured out what that was, because then I could have done more of it and avoided a lot of unpleasantries. One of the most important scientific discoveries ever was the result of collisions. Early in the twentieth century, Lord Rutherford directed two of his students to use a lump of radium to shoot alpha particles at a thin sheet of gold, surrounded by another sheet of zinc sulfide to capture the results. Prior to this experiment, the hazy vision of atomic struc- ture was referred to quaintly by English scientists as “plum pudding,” in which negatively

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charged corpuscles were vaguely surrounded by a positively-charged cloud. But when Rutherford’s students shot up the gold foil, the particles were deflected far more widely than anticipated, some more than ninety degrees. This told the scientist that the center, or nucleus, of the atom must have a significant positive charge. From this point, we ended up with a model containing neutrons and protons surrounded by electrons. We still follow this approach, crashing bits into other bits and capturing the pattern of the rubble. Yet still we don’t know all the laws that hold the larger model of the universe together. It’s the fact that we don’t know the rules, and because we want to discern what those rules are, that I thought of those random collisions as things of beauty, of illumina- tion.

urious civilians would glaze over when I told them I worked on a particle accelerator. I would snag a few more of them when I used the term “super-collider,” Cand even more of them when I used the more antiquated term “atom-smasher.” It sounds a bit more exciting. I also used to get asked all the time about quarks. People seemed at least nominally interested in them, probably because of the wacky name. I would explain that quarks are considered elementary particles, meaning there are no sub-particles to them. Atoms have protons, electrons, and neutrons. Quarks are just plain quarky. But they combine into hadrons, which include neutrons and protons. Quarks aren’t found in the wild. You have to look at the hadrons to see the quarks. There are six flavors of quark. That’s how they refer to them: flavors. I guess it takes some of the nerdy sting out of it. Those with the lowest mass, the up and down quarks, are loners who achieve that status through particle decay. Two other flavors are top and bottom. Along with up and down, they generate as much innuendo as is possible in physics. And then there are the oddly-named strange and charm. These, too, are heavier, more complex, yearning to be leaner and simpler, going their own way rather than stay bundled together. They desire that state of being stable, and of being common. And they aren’t natural. They result only from collisions, such as the kind produced by particle accelerators. Therein lies my problem: while leaner and no longer bundled, I am neither stable nor common. Each flavor of quark has an equal but opposite-charged doppelganger called, unimagi- natively enough, an antiquark. For me, that would be Dad. It wasn’t always that way, al-

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though the job at the collider made it appear that I was doing very important, very com- plicated things. I think he enjoyed telling people his son was a scientist, which wasn’t technically true, while simultaneously ridiculing the geeky aspects of it. One afternoon over baked beans and beer, we were all watching a special on the History Channel about UFOs, and Dad remarked, “I bet aliens would just love to abduct you, and suck out all that stuff in your brain.” “No, they wouldn’t,” Uncle Clint sniffed. “If they caught him in the tractor beam by mistake, they’d get him up to the mothership, and quickly figure out that they couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. Hell, they’d probably drop him off with cab fare.”

ne of the things that’s sustained me through all these ups and downs is my sense of humor. I’ve be able to maintain it even in the face of some really strange colli- Osions. Plenty of times when people thought I was ga-ga, I was really just cracking a joke. Of course, there were times when I was legitimately ga-ga, and just didn’t realize it. On occasion, the humor thing hasn’t gone over well, and looking back, there may have been a few times when the bad wiring in fact had a hand. One year I put something really nasty in the Christmas letter. Yeah, that one I wish I could have back. Aunt Vivian, who wasn’t really an aunt but was around all the time anyway, had fallen in with missionaries while running a resort on some island someplace, and returned from the Pacific as a born-again. Her solution to everything was prayer, although I noticed that she wasn’t averse to antibiotics or X-rays, when such were warranted. She dragged me onto the patio during Marie’s daughter’s birthday party one spring, roughly two months after a rela- tively benign episode for which I’d been involuntarily housed and medicated, and asked me if I was getting any better. I told her, I didn’t think I needed to be. Her return gaze told me she disagreed, and so she asked, “Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?” This was too easy. “No, I only accept Visa and Mastercard.” “Okay, I get it,” she whined. “You’ve been living on irony from TV and movies. It’s a problem all young people have in this generation. You’ve built this, this wall around you, constructed from Hollywood scripts. You have to get it through your head, that stuff isn’t real.” “No no no, I don’t believe everything I see on the tube,” I explained, more for my own amusement than for her education. “For example, in TV shows, people are jumping out of windows all the time, and then they just brush the glass off and go on their merry way. But

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I got thrown out a window at an A&W once, when I was fifteen, and I got sliced to ribbons. That was proof enough for me.” She looked at me for the longest time, then asked softly, “You got thrown out a window at the A&W?” I looked back at her for a slightly shorter time, then answered just as softly, “At the time, some people just couldn’t take a joke, I guess.”

eople still can’t take a joke. At today’s hearing, I will smile, but not laugh. I will crack no jokes, as long as my wiring doesn’t do it for me. I will be all business. Even Pin benign situations, humor can louse you up. Last summer I was in the hospital for yet another CAT scan, and the lovely registered nurse asked me, “So, how are we doing today?” “We?” I laughed. “I have no idea how you’re doing, but personally I’m screwed.” “Oh, well,” she tried to keep me calm, thinking this was necessary, “Today there’s nothing to worry about. This is the safest procedure in the world. But I’m required to ask, mind you … in case of an accident, whom do I notify?” I failed to amuse her with my reply: “Hickey Funeral Home. They do such great work there.” You have to try hard to be interesting, when your job entails creating events that are so tiny, whose hugeness cannot be comprehended without an advanced degree. Janine and I were at a block party once, and one guy was saying how he ran a coal-burning power plant, and another guy ran some kind of machinery for digging giant tunnels for diverting flood water, and another guy designed warehouses. The sheer scale of their efforts was physi- cally intimidating. So when they got around to me, I could only feebly stretch. “Who, me? I crash things into other things.” “Oh, cool. Like cars and stuff?” the architect asked. “Uh, no. Like atoms.” “Oh. Why?” “Looking for B mesons,” I answered proudly. “Uh … huh.” Janine found the essential nature of my work semi-interesting, but the day to day details gradually left her cold. One morning over breakfast, I attempted to divert her attention from the stove with my impending project, another planned collision. “In the last few runs, we’ve found more muons than anti-muons,” I explained, with

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what was probably a very phony version of an excited voice. “So?” “So? It means the difference in balance between matter and anti-matter. As in, y’know, the entire universe.” “Great,” she huffed, and she shoved a bowl of warmed-up apple sauce in front of me. “Here, eat all your damn muons, and it’ll be a good day today.” Thus, I had to learn not to take so seriously the work of figuring out how the universe is pasted together. At first I did this simply to get along better. But then my Uncle Clint, the doctor, put it to me this way: “We perform medical research in order to figure out a better way to treat people. But you, you smash crap into other crap to figure out how the universe was born, and if you come to a conclusion, you’ll be able to do exactly squat with that information. We could better spend all that budget feeding the poor.” Dad later explained to me that Uncle Clint, who’d voted for John Anderson in 1980, had gotten to hate physicists because of all the money that was spent on Star Wars under Rea- gan. This was when Dad still thought that my work was worthy. Of course, once he decided that I was batty, he also decided that my work was dull, or even contributing to my issues, and I stopped telling him anything at all about the lab, or the collider, or the numbers, or the collisions and the mapping of particles, or quarks and their properties. Marie had her own reasons for avoiding collisions with Dad. In high school, she had this creep boyfriend, Gary, who didn’t own a tee shirt without holes in it, and who always smelled of pot and Old Spice. He barely hid his intentions, and wasn’t too careful with his hands, even in front of Dad. I suggested to him one evening, in as friendly a manner as possible, that he should be a little more careful, maybe even gentlemanly, and he told me, as abruptly as he could, to mind my own effing business. He showed up one rainy night, while the folks were bowling, with a six-pack of Miller, and screamed for Marie to come down the stairs. I thought it was pretty cheeky, and I suggested he not do that again. So he took his muddy shoes off the coffee table and got in my face. His timing couldn’t have been worse, because that particular week I was having episodes. I don’t remember much, except that he ended up on the curb outside, wearing some of his beer. I was finally cognizant of myself once I was walking back in the door, just as Marie descended the stairs. “Where’s Gary?” she asked, to which I only replied with a jerk of my thumb, past the porch. She had one look, and said, “Just as well.”

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Dad seemed pleased that Gary was no longer in the picture, until Marie brought home a friend from her study group at the library. I had my suspicions about Laurie, although nothing that ever bothered me. Dad was less hesitant. “She’s one of those militant dykes,” he decided after just a handful of visits. Suddenly, Dad was asking whatever happened to the boyfriend. Marie left in a huff one night, and Dad was puzzled. I told him more than asked him, “You’d rather she hung out with a piece of crap boyfriend than an educated lesbian?” “That friend of hers has bad wiring,” he sneered. It was far too easy. “So do I, Dad. Remember?” Marie knew I always had her best interests in mind, as she always had mine. Despite my mostly upbeat approach over the years, still she felt she needed to encourage me, support me. It’s one of the things I loved most about her, as we grew older. I tried not to need anything from anybody, and she provided it anyway. She visited me at the facility near Skokie once, after I’d moved back home and subse- quently gotten a little lost trying to rake some snow and then tried to hold down the neigh- bor because I was convinced she was filled with helium and about to float away to her doom. Marie came to help with some paperwork so I could get out the following week. She told me about the school that she was soliciting the funding for, a school for children with various afflictions. She seemed so happy about the project. I’ve always been a good listener, so I asked her all about it. That beautiful face was all lit up. Wonderful husband, gorgeous child, good job. She was in a good place in life. I lived vicariously through those thoughts, over that next week. She also brought me a book of haiku. I wasn’t sure why she picked this specific volume, until I started seeing the basic theme. That first night, I found a particular nugget of opti- mism:

my house burned down now I can better see the rising moon

This fit in well with my existing tendencies to have a positive, or at least neutral, outlook on my condition. I came home the following Tuesday, and even Aunt Vivian, always the downer, suggested, “Hopefully they have you on the right stuff, and they’ve cast out your demons.”

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“You’re assigning good and evil to things,” I scolded her. “This is nothing but evil.” “No, really, it’s not. It just is. It’s like the tides. Or no, like a tornado. Sure, it does some damage, but it’s really just an event, an occurrence. A collision of random elements, like wind and trailer parks, followed by a scattering of particles, and furniture.” Various people thought I was on drugs, that I must be high, to have my issues. That was their reasonable explanation. My family knew better. They just thought I was plain nuts. Since I knew I wasn’t doing drugs, and wasn’t just going around looking for trouble, I kept feeling like I was crashing into the dark matter of the universe, and wishing that it came with a sign, or flashing lights, so I could avoid the collision.

ong before this particular occurrence, in my second year of post-grad, I collided with Janine, a nursing student with one year to go in her bachelor’s, with La part-time job maintaining the huge Printronix printers behind the counter in the computer lab. After perfecting any particular piece of code, I would print up not only the source but also the results of a run, to submit for grading. The first day I met her, she handed me my quarter-inch-thick pile of green-and-white striped paper, and I was instant- ly smitten. She had the most lovely, oval face, topped with curly, sandy hair, her cheeks so very lightly speckled with freckles. To this day, Janine still has this charmingly small mouth, tiny teeth, a slight frame that shows no sign of having had a child. I’d never had such a collision in my life. Marie and I spoke of it multiple times on the phone. She was the sole person I could speak to about anything at all. I probably sounded like an idiot, talking about the disorder going through my head, having found such a pretty and agreeable girl. My particles had scattered every which way. They remained as such. No one in the family, as far as I know, ever took Janine aside and said, “Occasionally he goes askew.” She thought of my more off-kilter moments as simply strange, or charming. We dated, on and off, mostly on, and were pulled increasingly into each other’s orbit. After I started working for Dennis, and she got a night shift at the hospital, we impulsively married. Marie was the only person in the family who cried, with sincere happiness for me. Dad asked me several times, including right up to the moment in the front of church, “You sure this is smart?” But I had allowed my ordered insides to become plum pudding. Instead of letting things take their course, I was taking control, and striving. I was tempting the universe. I had collided with love, and was deflected into marriage, and a possible future. There are many

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possible futures, and I was venturing to wherever my particles ended up. Like an idiot, I went from being a lone quark to being a compound, a more complex flavor. Aunt Vivian, all good intentions and misdirection and twice divorced, said, “A successful marriage is work. It’s not just going to happen on its own. You have to make it happen, each and every day.” It was a bit of a quandary for me. Was I inside the collision, waiting to see how I scattered, or in charge of the collision, measuring the results and taking the next step? Natural- ly, I asked Marie, and she informed me that I was overthinking it. “Be stupid for once,” she advised me, “and just be sure to make her happy. That should make you happy in return.” For years, and up to the very last moment, I strove to make Janine happy. All I ever wanted, and all I want to this day, is for everybody around me to be happy, in our big fat bowl of plum pudding. Now here I am, transferring buses, and once again tempting the universe. For just a fleeting moment, I can’t convince myself that the approaching bus is the right one. One of the meds I’m on is, I believe, meant to regulate my behavior in such a way that I don’t make impulsive decisions. The strange effect also keeps me from occasionally pulling the trigger on completely reasonable ones. But when the second bus pulls up and the doors hiss open, I force myself, with great effort, to board. I cannot screw this up. Failure to be on time or, worse yet, failure to show up at all, would give them all the ammunition they need. It would be an untimely mistake, not that there’s any other kind. I think that’s half the reason Dad is so manic about this subject, and wanting me confined for the sin of inheriting his recessive genes. I am an error. We lost Mom when I was eleven, and Dad has been completely black and white on every decision, every situation, ever since. Something is either correct, or a mistake. I honestly believe, though, that his distrust, disrespect, dis-everything, started my senior year of high school, when I put something kind of nasty in the family scrapbook. I didn’t do it to be a jerk. It was just one of those unregulated moments, when the little guy in my head that’s supposed to say, “Don’t do that” wasn’t paying attention. I sort of wish I could have that one back. At the time, Dad told me, “You’re supposed to learn from your mistakes. And yet, after you came along, we had Marie anyway.” Marie’s biggest mistake was telling Dad her conflicting opinions. My biggest mistake was simply being me. His biggest mistake was having children, apparently.

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uring one exceptionally mild winter, Janine and I went to the Brookfield Zoo for the members-only Christmas soiree. Saw the polar bears, the gorillas, the pen- Dguins, watched the magician make ping-pong balls disappear from his hand. Saw the rhino take an enormous dump, which she told me not to videotape. And then next to the Discovery Center near the front, by where the ice sculptors made eagles and dolphins with chainsaws, there was the talking tree. A large evergreen was commenting on passersby, their hats, their coats. It made mention of my Cleveland Browns jacket. It’s a huge coat, the kind the coaches wear on the sidelines. Incredibly warm. Janine had gotten it for me for traveling to conferences, figuring that since the Browns were so bad, I’d never get into hassles with Packers or Vikings fans for wearing a Bears jacket. So the tree asked, “Hey, don’t you root for the Bears? What’s with the Browns coat?” This was a dilemma. Usually people talk about the conflict between their hearts and their heads. With me, the conflict is always in the same room. Why my wiring was bad that particular night, I do not know, because I do not understand the rules. So while my head was telling me it was just a guy standing in a nearby building with a microphone, for the amusement of the crowd, my head also told me the tree itself was talking. I even looked for a mouth. For some reason, its critique of my clothing, its sheer omniscience, struck some kind of nerve. So I guess I said a few choice things to the tree, and freaked out the guy on the other end of the wire. Luckily we were near the end of our evening, so we’d pretty much already seen everything by the time they escorted me out. Janine walked a few paces behind, likely mortified. It was a long, silent ride home. I’d stopped making excuses. I’d exhausted every possible explanation, and she was at the point where she no longer believed them in any case.

hen, at long last, I was properly diagnosed, or as close to it as I could be, I was somewhat relieved. I could point to this thing, and say, “See, I told you I Wwasn’t crazy.” There was a reasonable, technical, scientific, organic reason for everything. Best of all, it wasn’t the product of self-abuse, drug abuse, or alcoholism, not that I’d ever been much of a drinker. It was simply that Mom and Dad’s DNA had collided in such a way that I turned out with just that little bit of bad wiring. My chemicals, the way in which my synapses fire off, the signals, were just the tiniest bit off. Although sometimes

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it surely doesn’t seem tiny. The impetus for the diagnosis was a busy morning when I insisted that somebody was locked inside the collider and would be shredded any second by quarks and muons and even breakfast cereal flying around inside. The day the specialist pronounced sentence, Janine sat there with me, holding my hand. I thought she too would feel relieved. She wasn’t married to a crazy person, or an addict. Instead, it led her to something far different. She seemed almost frightened of it. The specialist tried explaining that, with this diagnosis, they could begin a proper treatment. “Why has it been getting so much worse lately?” she asked. The specialist could only shake his head. There were three different pills, two of them once a day, the third one three times a day. I started them all at once. This turned out to be a huge mistake. Things happened. They happened while I slept, while I had breakfast, while I was at work. I explained to Dennis that I had a chemical imbalance that needed balancing over time. He was fine with it, and modified my duties just a hair. After a couple of weeks, the meds got changed a bit. The lithium stayed, and the other two were replaced. Then one went away completely. The following month, another change. What it was, was the medical authorities shooting alpha particles at my brain, to see what kind of behavior I might imprint on the zinc sulfide. While making a sandwich for work one morning, I came out of a trance, and found that I had carved something rather ridiculous out of a slice of baloney. Janine stared at it for a time, then said with a frown, “Those voices in your head, they’re not real.” I tried to make a joke of it. “After three weeks on the new pills, I’ve come to understand that. And yet sometimes they have great suggestions for dinner.” She was not amused. My calculations remained unaffected. I continued setting up the meat grinder that fed the collider, and all was well, or at least as well as it could be, as my chemicals evened out, and stopped colliding so violently with the particles in my brain. But while I saw the positive change in myself, I saw the negative in Janine. Resentment. Tedium. More resentment. She found excuses to be gone, more and more. Our occasional lunch appointments dried up. Our love life, for some time limited to weekends, began to skip even those weekends. The awkward subject of kids came up at family gatherings, as in, “When are you going to have one?” After the diagnosis, it became an unspoken finality: we would never have any. Ever. She was afraid of spawning an outcast.

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Even before the space between us became irreparably filled with plum pudding, and Janine began acting like a widow to a still-living husband, it went without saying, for the longest time, that she and I would not have a child. Given all the random accidents in the world, we had opted out of the diocesan natural family planning program (despite her par- ents’ insistence) in favor of the Pill. I was too much of a coward to get fixed, and I would have never considered asking her to get her tubes tied, despite a suggestion from the family doctor, since it was not only final, it was also penalizing her for my being a mistake. I’ve never gotten credit from her for ignoring the notion. Of course, now she has a beautiful daughter. In a bitter moment, Marie told me, “That child should have been yours.” I told her, “No. Never could that have been true.”

he tipping point for us came on that lovely day which I’ll never forget, when I awoke to find that Janine hadn’t bothered filling two of my prescriptions the day Tbefore. I still had some lithium, but the other damn thing I was taking at the time – can’t recall what – were out. We were doing a dry collision run that day, so I couldn’t wait for the pharmacy to open at nine, and she was in such a mood that I didn’t want to risk asking her to get them filled and run them to the lab. In retrospect, being late would have been a far wiser move. I left the facility that day in plastic cuffs, not because I was under arrest, but because it was safest for everyone. The boss knew I wasn’t being an ass, that I was simply under or over-medicated. He stood nearby while I sat in the back of the squad car, door open, and I was able, in a lucid moment, to tell him what had happened with my prescriptions. He called Janine for me. I was still lucid enough to know that, rather than concern, she would have nothing but scorn. At that moment, it dawned on me that somehow I’d married my own dad. Two weeks later, a week after I’d gotten out of the hospital, I sat in the kitchen eating Froot Loops out of the box, and Dennis called to tell me they’d made the run. Everything had gone swimmingly. My calculations had been perfect. My numbers had been sweet to me. With my marriage just about in the toilet, those numbers were my one solid place to stand, other than Marie. Our final moment of faking it for the family came to an end at her nephew’s first com- munion, during which I had ad-libbed, almost involuntarily, the recitation that the priest had guided the congregation through.

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“Do you reject Satan, and all his works, and all his empty promises, and all his telemar- keting pitches, and all his hairy-chested come-ons?” This was the end. We sold the house for a nice chunk more than our price, although we still had nine years left on the mortgage. We split the money, and went in different directions. Janine never asked for support. Her job paid better than mine, and in any case, she was remarried within fourteen months. Just as well. Within five months, I was off the collider and out in the real world, where living arrangements and jobs came and went. There was an apartment. There was a short stint living with Marie and her husband, but I got out of there before I could cause any resentment, complications, or damage. There was a halfway house. There was a work release program. There were here-and- there stays with Dad, and a rented condo. There was a job stocking shelves. There was another job placing and picking up orange cones along road construction sites. And then a pretty nice deal, tutoring inner city kids in math. Mostly geometry and algebra, although there was the treat of the occasional calculus gig. That went away, not because of any bla- tant incidents, but rather some blanking out, and some intermittent relapses. My regimen now included some kind of downer, for everyone’s safety, but the interactions were fierce. The last straw for the program director was an argument I had with myself, during a session with a particularly gifted high school senior. “For the sake of this example, let’s set X equal to five. Although for the life of me, I don’t understand why should X equal anything. Why can’t X have its own identity? Why does it have to carry the emotional and numerical baggage for somebody else?” Any of these gigs were far better than the single slot I found for myself on the side, mopping up at a peep show joint. It was foul, just fifteen bucks a night, and lasted only five weeks. After that, I was a ticket taker at a music theater on the weekends, and a courier by day, until I woke up on the tollway, in the company car forty miles north of the city, with no recollection of how I’d gotten there, and with a state policeman behind me, lights flashing. The last time I saw Aunt Vivian, before she ran off to some Catholic compound in Flor- ida, was the second and last time I had moved back in with Dad, into my childhood home. She was trying to be less judgmental, focusing less on the intolerant aspect of her faith, and more on the positive. She really is a sweet lady, and I so wish she’s found this side of herself years earlier. Anyway … she offered me a more conciliatory view of my condition. “Maybe … maybe this is a gift,” she told me with a very forced smile. “It’s a burden that

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will lead you to greater things. Maybe even a greater understanding of the world.” For the first time ever, I almost agreed with her. “Maybe. For all I know, this is nature’s way of bombarding me with cosmic rays or something, so I can figure out what’s in my Black Box.” That quickly, Vivian’s smile dried up. “You’re either a true Christian,” she decided, “or a complete idiot.” Vivian, sweet and batty, left shortly thereafter. Uncle Clint moved in with his daughter in Minneapolis, not that I missed him much. Cousin Trent ended up in a Mexican jail, which is a long story. I no longer used numbers to divine the secrets of the universe. Dad barely acknowledged me when I passed him in the hallway of the house I grew up in. But at least I still had Marie.

hen Marie died of melanoma, I became plum pudding. It was four years after I’d left the lab, three years after my divorce, and nine months after I’d been com- Wmitted by Dad, with little resistance from myself, to a facility north of the city. She had been there as a steady presence in my life, when all around me, our father, the girl I had loved, my chosen profession, the indiscernible Black Box of my existence, had all consigned me to the trash heap. Marie had been my rock, the fixed point in my sky, the fulcrum to my undulating endpoints. Her love and concern had been unconditional, and unaffected by my deteriorating condition. But she had collided with the nuclear particles radiating from the sun, which over time had altered her makeup, awakening the lethally dormant cells that dwell in all of us, turning them from neutral to malignant. Dad came to the hospital where I was confined, roughly a week after she had passed, to inform me. He told me that very little time had transpired between her diagnosis and her death, and that she had kept it fairly secret until near the very end. I asked about services; he told me, she had already been waked, celebrated, and buried. In any case, I would not have been allowed out to attend. In retrospect, I see where he likely thought he was doing me a charity by telling me after the fact. But in the moment, I took it as an insult. He wasn’t telling me that my beloved sister, his own daughter, had died. He was telling me that I hadn’t been invited, as if I needed to be. And so my order became chaos. My fixed point in the sky was gone. My steady nature, my sense of humor, my ability to accept that which I could not change, went away. I was able to objectively observe this. Even at my looniest, I had ever retained my ability to keep my head in charge of my heart, even in those times that my head abandoned or misled me.

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Instead of simply accepting Dad’s edicts that I report to some facility, or that I allow myself to be committed for the sake of convenience, I filed disputes. I went to hearings. I never really lost any of them, but never really won. On one occasion I was remanded into the custody of the state. In a couple of others, I ended up in some other custody. Otherwise, I’ve managed a supervised lifestyle. I have two secret bank accounts, money left over from selling the house I shared with Janine, which allow me to manage independently when necessary, although there’s not a ton left. I’ve also gotten into a couple more programs. Eventually, the state will forget about me. Erratic behavior is far more tolerable than violence. I’ve only swung at people twice or thrice, with no permanent damage. I am the most mundane of crazy people. Of course, after Dad told me about Marie, I did threaten to kill the increasingly vicious cat he’d gotten after Mom died. When a case worker questioned me about it, I spoke a lie. I told her, I love cats, and would never hurt an innocent creature. This was, of course, another lie. I really, really hate cats. But I really, really loved Marie. Hence … plum pudding.

ne of the first things I did, after hearing of Marie, and once I was back on the street, was visit my brother-in-law Marcus. For Marie’s sake, I went to see her O family. I didn’t know how poisoned he was to me, or me to him. But before I could knock, he opened the door, because he saw the cab drop me off in front of the house. With just a moment’s hesitation, he invited me in, and I told him how very sorry I was, for the both of us, and for their child. Marcus told me, we had both been lucky for having known and loved her. He also told me how many times she had spoken of me, and how much she had obviously loved me. This last bit crashed into my chest as if shot from an accelerator. And so, despite so many opportunities to do so during the past several years of disappointment, agony, unem- ployment, divorce, and abandonment, I cried for the first time since I had been a teenager. I had had nothing whatsoever to do with the collisions that had killed her, but the guilt was there. When she likely needed all the comfort she could get, I was unavailable by vir- tue of being institutionalized. I gave Marcus my best, then walked out of his house, and back into the facility I had just left. The first night in, I ran headlong into the wall. It hurt like hell, but I was still rela- tively conscious, so I did it again. This got me a ticket to a lesser institution for the next ten months.

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The state doesn’t wish to, and certainly cannot afford to, keep you housed and enter- tained indefinitely, if you are at least functional. Heck, there are plenty of people who truly are not functional, and they’re released all the time. So off I went, with a paper and a phone number entitling me to set up boxes on pallets so that somebody who wasn’t considered a loony could use a forklift to move the pallets on to trucks. The following year, as part of the dedication ceremonies for the opening of the school Marie had helped conceive and design, the administrators, in conjunction with her husband, held a memorial service. At the conclusion, everybody placed some memento or other into a capsule to be buried beside the cornerstone. Marcus was on hand, with his and Marie’s child at his side, but he has never been much of a public speaker. Marie’s old boss told an anecdote of the day he’d hired her. The chair- man of the board detailed how Marie’s sincere pleas to the powers that be had been instru- mental in acquiring the funding. And so came my moment, representing the family, my attempt at atonement, to show that I was worthy of her. I know there some concern over what I might say, or how I might say it. Marcus asked in advance, “Have you taken your meds?” “Of course,” I assured him. As I stood at the podium, I saw how bright the lights were, and I knew I’d have a hard time reading my notes on my little index card. My floaters were having a convention that week. So I winged it. What made it easy was, I believed every word of it. “In that lonely time since we lost our beloved Marie, we’ve all grown older and wiser,” I began, my voice cracking, “but Marie hasn’t aged a minute since that day. She is forever young and beautiful. When we see her again – and we shall, if we are very, very good – still she shall be … young and beautiful. So let’s all be very, very good, and give ourselves that opportunity.” Marie’s boss told me, I should have been a poet. I told her, my entire life is a poem, only free form. No rhyme, no reason. The punctuation is all wrong. I’m e.e. cummings, incar- nate. My wife had left, my father had disowned me to a degree, I had no steady place in life, and Marie was gone. I had followed the seemingly natural path from being a complex quark to my simplest form, a lone particle with no clinging sub-particles. This is merely the way the universe works. You have stuff, and then you don’t. What I don’t see from outside the Black Box is all the other steps.

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he hearing goes smoothly. I nod to Dad as I enter. He’s early, as always. I wish I could have made it there before him, just for show, but still, I had fifteen minutes Tto spare. I’m not ready for small talk, so I go back into the hall, find a bench, and pretend to go over the summons one more time, until it begins. The judge asks where I’ve been living. I provide a brochure from the group home, and a letter from the director de- scribing my model behavior. I inform him that I can stay there indefinitely, since I’m subsi- dizing my own costs with two jobs, and I’m tutoring other residents in science, math, and reading and writing skills. I take my meds regularly. I can honestly tell him I haven’t had contact with the police in over five years, and I’ve never actually been arrested or charged with a crime. I can control my own affairs. I am striving to re-enter the sciences, although I know secretly this is likely never to happen. Dad isn’t disputing anything, isn’t calling for anything. He is simply observing. We’re no longer in each other’s orbit, but he’s not ready to completely cut me lose from his electron field. He asks me how I’m doing. Well, I inform him. I have no harsh words. I know better than to ask about his cat, since even joking about it might come off as sinister. I wish him well, and ask him if he’s visited Marie. He has. I tell him, it’s five different buses for me to get there, and I’d love a ride sometime. He nods again. For just a fleeting second, I feel I may cry. But I don’t. I try not to blame him for passing on faulty wiring through his DNA. I just wish he hadn’t blamed me for receiving it. George Bernard Shaw said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Certainly I have not adapted myself to the world. Yet neither have I done a stellar job of trying to adapt it to me, since I have assigned such undiscovered mystery to it, and I don’t presume to know how to mold it to my needs. So I suppose I am neither reasonable nor unreasonable, and certainly I have made no progress. With all my might, or lack thereof, I have simply maintained my position in the collider. Is this acceptance, or acquiescence? I do not know. It simply is. I didn’t ask for this. This was given to me. And while I don’t subscribe to Aunt Vivian’s rationalization that this thing of mine has been a gift, because it has yet to reveal to me the complete contents of my nucleus, neither do I resign myself to thinking of it as a curse. This thing is a neutral. Neither good nor bad, it simply is. None of us can violate the laws governing the boundaries we cannot even see. The rules have been set in place, the con-

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tents of the Black Box remain undetermined, and we must all abide. The stars, and their bazillions of particles, are not the fixed points. We are those fixed points. Therefore, we do not have collisions with the universe. It has collisions with us.