Brilliant Light

56 PERSONAL HISTORY BRILLIANT LIGHT A chemical boyhood. 6 BY O LI V ER SAC KS Something has got into me these last Achilles. Or you could alloy copper with weeks—I do not know why. I have pulled zinc, my mother said, to produce brass. out my old books (and bought many new All of us—my mother, my brothers, ones), have set the little tungsten bar on a and I—had our own brass menorahs for pedestal and papered the kitchen with Hanukkah. (My father, though, had a chemical charts. I read lists of cosmic abun- silver one.) dances in the bath. On cold, dismal Satur- I knew copper, the shiny rose color day afternoons, there is nothing better than of the great copper cauldron in our curling up with a fat volume of Thorpe’s kitchen—it was taken down only once a Dictionary of Applied Chemistry, opening year, when the quinces and crab apples it anywhere, and reading at random. It were ripe in the garden and my mother was Uncle Tungsten’s favorite book, and would stew them to make jelly. now it is one of mine. On depressive morn- I knew zinc—the dull, slightly bluish ings, I like to work out atomic radii or ion- birdbath in the garden was made of ization potentials with my Grape-Nuts— zinc—and tin, from the heavy tinfoil in their charm has come back, and they will get which sandwiches were wrapped for a me going for the day. picnic. My mother showed me that when tin or zinc was bent it uttered a I—BEFORE THE WAR special “cry.” “It’s due to deformation of the crystal structure,” she said, forget- ANY of my childhood memo- ting that I was five and could not un- ries are of metals: these seemed derstand her—and yet her words made M to exert a power on me from me want to know more. the start. They stood out, conspicuous There was an enormous cast-iron against the heterogeneousness of the lawn roller out in the garden—it weighed world, by their shining, gleaming qual- five hundred pounds, my father said. ity, their silveriness, their smoothness We, as children, could hardly budge it, and weight. They seemed cool to the but he was immensely strong and could touch, and they rang when they were lift it off the ground. It was always struck. slightly rusty, and this bothered me, for I also loved the yellowness, the heav- the rust flaked off, leaving little cavities iness of gold. My mother would take and scabs, and I was afraid the whole the wedding ring from her finger and roller might corrode and fall apart one let me handle it for a while, as she told day, reduced to a mass of red dust and me of its inviolacy, how it never tar- flakes. I needed to think of metals as nished. “Feel how heavy it is,” she stable, like gold—able to stave off the would add. “It’s even heavier than lead.” losses and ravages of time. I knew what lead was, for I had handled the heavy, soft piping the plumber had WOULD sometimes beg my mother left behind one year. Gold was soft, too, I to bring out her engagement ring my mother told me, so it was usually and show me the diamond in it. It combined with another metal to make flashed like nothing I had ever seen, al- it harder. most as if it gave out more light than it It was the same with copper—people took in. My mother showed me how mixed it with tin to produce bronze. easily it scratched glass, and then she Bronze! The very word was like a trum- told me to put it to my lips. It was pet to me, for battle was the brave clash strangely, startlingly cold—metals felt of bronze upon bronze, bronze spears cool to the touch, but the diamond was on bronze shields, the great shield of icy. That was because it conducted heat ROBERT PARKHARRISON, “EDISON’S LIGHT” (1998)/BONNI BENRUBI GALLERY 58 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 20, 1999 so well, she said—better than any Did the sun and stars burn in the same light up my cavern of sheets with an metal—so it drew the body heat away way? Why did they never go out? eerie, greenish light. from one’s lips when they touched it. All these things—the rubbed amber, This was a feeling I was never to forget. Y mother showed me other won- the magnets, the crystal radio, the clock Another time, she showed me how if M ders—she had a necklace of dials with their tireless coruscations— one touched a diamond to a cube of ice polished yellow pieces of amber, and gave me a sense of invisible rays and it would draw heat from one’s hand into she showed me how, when she rubbed forces, a sense that beneath the familiar the ice and cut straight through it as if them, tiny pieces of paper would fly up world of colors and appearances lay a it were butter. and stick to them. Or she would put the dark, hidden world of mysterious laws My mother told me that diamond electrified amber against my ear, and I and phenomena. was a special form of carbon, like the would hear and feel a tiny snap, a spark. coal we used in every room in winter. I My older brothers Marcus and Da- GREW up in London, before the war. was puzzled by this—how could black, vid were fond of magnets, and enjoyed I My father and mother were both flaky, opaque coal be the same as the demonstrating them to me, drawing a physicians. My father had his surgery in hard, transparent gemstone in her ring? magnet beneath a piece of paper on the house, with all sorts of medicines, I would gaze into the heart of the which were strewn powdery iron filings. lotions, and elixirs in the dispensary— coal fire, watching it go from a dim red I never tired of the remarkable patterns it looked like an old-fashioned chem- glow to orange, to yellow, and blow on which rayed out from the poles of the ist’s shop in miniature—and a small lab it with the bellows until it glowed al- magnet. “Those are lines of force,” my with a spirit lamp, test tubes, and re- most white-hot. If it got hot enough, brother Marcus explained to me—but I agents for testing patients’ urine, like I wondered, would it blaze blue, be was none the wiser. the bright-blue Fehling’s solution, blue-hot? Then there was the crystal radio I which turned yellow when there was I loved light, especially the light- played with in bed, jiggling the wire on sugar in the urine. There were potions ing of the Sabbath candles on Friday the crystal until I got a station loud and and cordials in cherry red and golden nights, when my mother would mur- clear. And the luminous clocks—the yellow, and colorful liniments like gen- mur a prayer as she lit them. I was not house was full of them, because my tian violet and malachite green. allowed to touch them once they were Uncle Abe had been a pioneer in the de- I badgered my parents constantly lit—they were sacred, I was told, their velopment of luminous paints. These, with questions. Where did color come flames were holy, not to be fiddled too, like my crystal radio, I would take from? Why did the platinum loop cause with. The little cone of blue flame at under the bedclothes at night, into my the gas to catch fire? What happened the candle’s center—why was it blue? private, secret vault, and they would to the sugar when one stirred it into the tea? Where did it go? Why did water bubble when it boiled? (I liked to watch water set to boil on the stove, to see it quiv- ering with heat before it burst into bubbles.) Whenever we had “a fuse,” my father would climb up to the porcelain fuse box high on the kitchen wall, identify the fused fuse, now reduced to a melted blob, and replace it with a new one of an odd, soft wire. I had not known that a metal could melt, nor did I know why it had melted. Could a fuse really be made from the same material as a lawn roller or a tin can? What was electricity, and how did it flow? Was it a sort of fluid like heat, which could also be conducted? Why did it flow through the metal but not the porcelain? This, too, called for explanation. My questions were endless, and touched on everything, though “I was once a very beautiful woman, but forty years of they tended to circle around, re- reading the ‘Times’ has taken its toll.” turn to, my obsession, the met- STRANGE LIQUID METAL 59 als. Why were they shiny? Why smooth? Why cool? Why hard? Why heavy? Why did they bend, not break? Why did they ring? My mother tried to ex- plain, but eventually, when I exhausted her patience, she would say, “That’s all I can tell you—you’ll have to quiz Uncle Dave to learn more.” E had called him “Uncle Tung- W sten” for as long as I could re- member, because he manufactured light bulbs with filaments of fine tungsten wire.

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