Every Atom Belonging

Dan C. McKinnis

Copyright 2010, All Rights Reserved

…what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me

As good belongs to you.

     --Walt Whitman,

     “Song of Myself”

If we could succeed, at a small expenditure of labour, in converting carbon into diamonds, their value might fall below that of bricks.

     --Karl Marx,

     Capital

Part One

As Good Belongs to You

There are a lot of things in this book you are going to find a little difficult to believe.  Some things I’m sure you’ll find a little more questionable than others.  You may, if fact, simply choose to believe that I actually just made the whole thing up.  And I can see why.  I sure as hell wouldn’t believe any of this…only it did happen.  Just not yet.

Okay, I’ll just get this out of the way, since it’s the part of my story you’re probably going to have the most trouble buying.  Everything you’re about to read will happen as you read it.  If, for some reason you don’t hear anything about it, it’s because something went wrong on our end, and where I am split off into an alternate universe.  If you don’t think the universe is layered, however, I’m not so sure you should even be reading this book in the first place.  You can ask any quantum physicists you chance to meet, though, and they might tell you, depending on which school of though they subscribe to, that the universe splits in two every second.  Yes, I know, it’s unfathomable, but our minds weren’t made to process such things.  Honestly, a lot of what I’m going to tell you—I’m only passing it along.  There is so much, for the life of me, I don’t understand.  What I do get, though, I promise I’ll do my best to explain it.  But what I can’t explain, what I don’t understand, I assure there is someone who does.  His name is Chris.

In our previous lives, Chris and I were friends.  I almost hesitate to say we were best friends—even though that’s how he always referred to me that way, both before and after his disappearance—only because, well, to be perfectly honest, I’ve always had a hard time thinking of myself as being on the same level as him.  Not like I’ve ever though of him as superhuman, but if something along the lines of second sight or a sixth sense exists, I think Chris, although he never talked about it, must have been brushed by it pretty heavy.  Hit over the head might be a better way to put it.

Back to what I was saying about this book being from the future, I should clarify that Einstein certainly wasn’t wrong.  No matter can travel faster than the speed of light.  As an object approaches C, it’s mass approaches infinity.  Chris always talked about it as approaching zero, though, and he often referred to the symbol for infinity as “a zero with just a little half-twist.”  He said for something to exceed the speed of light, it would theoretically have to have negative mass, which is scientifically, logically impossible.  So, when I tell you these words traveled to you across not just space and cyberspace, but time as well, I’ve no doubt you might say something along the lines of my hat needing another layer of tin foil.

But let me finish.

We agreed that no object can outrun light.  But if we’re going to get technical about it—and believe me, we most certainly are—then for something to qualify as an actual object, as opposed to simply an abstract, it would entail said object having mass.  However, there are things in this world without mass:  emotions, ideas…data.  Einstein never said anything about whether information could travel faster than light.  Did he?

So, when I say that what you are reading here comes from the future, I hope you don’t mistake my meaning.  I’m not saying that I wrote a book, printed it up, stuck it in some Wellsian time machine, and hit “Send.”  I mean, yes, I did write this.  I put the characters, letters, and words in this order you now see and transmitted them, but they came to you down a network of relays engineered with entangled particles.

If you don’t know anything about quantum entanglement, or as it’s also known, quantum non-local connection, let me explain real quick.  You see, back in 1935 Einstein and two other big brains weren’t quite convinced that Niels Bohr’s theory of quantum mechanics was without a loose end or two.  After a few thought experiments, they found Bohr’s work inconclusive, and came up with entanglement as a way to fill in the gaps.  The way they figured it, either non-local connection was a real phenomenon, or quantum mechanics was flawed.  It would be another 45 years before someone actually verified entanglement.  It would be another 5 before someone figured out how to make a profit from it, and another 15 years before someone figured out what it was actually good for.

In a nutshell, our observable universe, there are related pairs of electrons, each one having the opposite spin of the other.  When the spin of the first particle is reversed, the spin of the second automatically flips to mirror it.  The strange thing about entanglement, though, is that the corresponding flip is instantaneous.  Conventional communication requires time.  Say you want to talk with someone on the Moon.  You’d simply send a message over a system of satellite relays.  But even though the signal moves along at the speed of light, there’s still a delay, and even more of a delay for the response to come back.  With entanglement, though, one particle could be on Earth, and its partner could be on Neptune, and if you flip the one on Earth, the one on Neptune is going to flip without a second’s pause.

Einstein may have been one of the people who came up with the entanglement paradox, but he was far from comfortable with it.  He reportedly dismissed it as "spukhafte Fernwirkung," or “spooky action at a distance.”  If you ask me, though, I just don’t think he could rest easy with something that seemingly violated his ideas about time travel running around.

Well, it wasn’t long after entanglement among naturally occurring pairs of particles was officially observed before people figured out how to artificially entangle them.  From there, it wasn’t much of a leap to devices that could communicate using entangled particles and binary code.  This came in really handy a few decades later when a few investors on Wall Street had refined the art of the short-sell, and secretly used the few millisecond advantage to get the jump on other brokers whenever possible.  After a few years of beating the other guys to the punch, though, the technology began to leak everywhere, and before long it was too prevalent to be anything but a standard resource for making quick money on the stock market.

The government, of course, caught on, as well.  Entangling particles wasn’t too expensive, but building two-way communication systems that employed them—well, you might say a lot of $50,000 toilet seats went into developing much more sophisticated versions than anyone on Wall Street had access to.  And while it did let America and the UK get the drop on foreign powers for a short time, the technology soon became rampant on the world political scene.  In short, though, entangled communication was essentially the second coming of the telegraph.  Transmission times were cut to what was previously considered an impossibility.  In absolute terms, the difference in delivery time was nowhere near as dramatic as it had been with the jump from steam train and Pony Express to electrical impulses, but in a relative sense…it was practically analogous to warping time.

But I think we’re getting a little off topic here.  Entanglement plays a part in this story, but not till later.  For now, we’ll start small.  Very small.

#

Sub-Zero Sum

“…I’ve given all I can

It’s not enough

I’ve given all I can

But we’re still on the payroll.”

--Radiohead

“Karma Police”

#

Diamonds.  It began with diamonds.  At least, that was the point where Chris’s work began to filter through the media’s layer of self-serving social haze, into the carefully manicured corners of what I’d always considered the real world.  This was also where I first came into the picture.  When Chris came back, it was like two universes colliding.  Everything that had been happening in his world had, up until then, essentially been outside my world’s event horizon.  Nothing that happened to Chris during the decade he was missing, nothing he said or did—none of it ever made it into my world, which is to say, your world, as well, unless it first went through the proper channels.  And I may have never heard from him at all—no one would have—had he not found an improper channel or two…or trillion.

It didn’t stop with diamonds, of course.  That was only the beginning, but looking back, I’d have to say it was a pretty good place to start.  That Chris chose to open his Pandora’s Box with diamonds only made sense, I guess.  They had, after all, been his first encounter with an artificial value system.  Apparently, one day when Chris was only in first grade, he was at the mall with his mother and they happened to pass by a jewelry store.  Chris knew his numbers by then, and he was starting to learn how much things tended to cost.  When he saw diamond rings in the store window going for upwards of a thousand dollars, an incomprehensible sum for him, he stopped his mom with a gentle tug on her arm and asked why the shiny little things were so expensive.

When she said they were so expensive because in all the world there were only so many of them, he asked why there weren’t more.  She said a lot of people liked them and they were very hard to find, and sometimes people had to dig very deep to get at them.  And when Chris asked her what would happen if diamonds weren’t so hard to find, if you could just walk outside and pick them up off the street, she said she didn’t know, but she was pretty sure people wouldn’t care for them as much, and there probably wouldn’t be any more movies about diamond thieves pulling off impossible heists.

And so, at the impressionable age of six and three-quarters, Chris first shook the Invisible Hand of Supply and Demand.  It was also later that day—so he told me once, anyway—that he first began diving into the idea of a machine that would make diamonds.  Pure whimsy, but wasn’t it Einstein who said that imagination is more important than knowledge?  After he set off on his thought experiment, though, he quickly realized if he did make a machine, there could only be one.  Otherwise, he figured, he’d never get rich.  Everyone would just make their own diamonds, and before long no one would even want them anymore.  If he ever actually got his hands on a diamond machine, he’d have to keep it secret.  Very.  Secret.

This was back when Chris still wanted to be rich, before he started to see things on a larger scale—one, he said, that was big enough to negate humanities significance within the universe. 

Chris’s idea for a diamond making machine might have stayed just one kid’s fantasy if not for the fourth-grade class put on when we were both nine.  It was a retelling of an old Scandinavian folk tale called “Why the Sea Is Salt.”  I can remember the day our teacher was casting parts and everyone wanted the part of Rich Brother or Gnome #1 or Ship Captain.  No one wanted to be Poor Brother.  Of course, no one had actually read the play.  If they had, they’d have realized that Poor Brother was the lead role with about twice as many lines as any other part, and all the kids would’ve been clamoring to be the star.  But when every other part had been assigned, and Chris had yet to be cast, it was pretty clear the teacher had had him in mind the whole time.

He learned his lines in no time, and his older sister, who was in her junior high’s drama club at the time, helped him find his character’s motivation.  The story opens with this poor starving brother begging something to eat for what he swears is the absolute last time from his well-to-do brother, who begrudgingly hands over a small slab of bacon and tells him never to bother him for a handout again.  The poor brother, grateful as all hell that he now has something to bring home to his wife, kisses his brother’s feet and leaves, clutching the bacon to his chest, bowing while he thanks his brother over and over and over.

On his way back home, however, the poor brother is stopped by a gnome who pokes his head out of a cave.  He’s caught the smell of the poor brother’s bacon, and bacon, it just so happens, is a gnome’s absolute favorite thing in the whole wide world.  The gnome starts going crazy over the smell of the bacon and tells the brother he’ll give him anything in exchange for the bacon.  The brother says he needs the bacon because he and his wife are hungry, to which the gnome says hold on a sec and disappears back into the cave for a moment.  When he returns he’s holding a little hand-held mill that will turn out anything you ask it to so long as you say the magic words and turn the little crank.  The gnome gives a demonstration and produces a string of delicious sausages to the brother’s complete amazement.  The gnome says that the mill isn’t much good to his people because for some reason it won’t make bacon for them, nor will it make money with which to buy any.  The brother makes the deal, and as he’s leaving, the gnome makes him repeat over and over the magic words that make the mill not only start, but stop as well.

The man runs home and shows the mill to his wife and within a few weeks he’s not only ground out enough food to fill his pantry for three winters, but he’s also ground out tons of building materials and built a new house for him and his wife.  Before long the man realizes they have enough, and he wants to go and show his gratitude to his brother for having helped him through hard times, so he brings the mill over to his brother’s house and shows him the source of his recent good fortune.

The rich brother’s eyes grow wide when he sees what the mill can do, and even though it won’t grind out money for him, he asks to borrow it for a little while.  When the poor brother refuses, the rich one reminds him of all the times he’s helped him over the years and how he and his wife would have died of hunger long ago had it not been for his magnanimity.  Mostly out of guilt, the poor brother hands over the mill and teaches the magic words to his brother, who, once he’s alone with the mill, runs off to talk to one of the sea captains down at the harbor.  He figures if he can’t make money from the mill, he can make money with the mill by renting it out.

He meets a salt merchant who, when he realizes he can fill his cargo hold for free, agrees to split his profits with the brother and sets sail, figuring he’ll just restock his inventory in between ports.  After a few days out at sea, however, the captain sees his hold is nearly full, and goes to try and stop the mill.  But, as the guy’s eyes had been so full of gold coins when the rich brother was teaching him the magic words, they went in one ear and out the other.  By the end of the day the captain and his crew have jumped overboard, and the ship, along with the still-churning mill, is at the bottom of the sea.  And it’s at this point of the play that the narrator comes out and says:

“The mill kept grinding with never a halt,

And that is why the sea is salt.”

Maybe Chris’s teacher mostly chose him for the lead because she knew he’d be capable of memorizing the lines, probably in a single night; his mind was a steel trap it seemed from the moment he learned to speak.  But I doubt it was really a coincidence Chris came from the poorest family in the whole class.  I’m not saying she was looking to bring an element of verisimilitude to the production.  I just think she wanted to show Chris that sometimes, in life just as in the play, the size of a person’s wallet has nothing to do with the size of the part they play in the grand scheme of things.

I don’t know if there really is a God.  I mean, I’ve seen things in my thirty-three years to make for a strong case either way—miracles and atrocities that have both filled me with equal parts wonder and terror.  The older I get, though, the more I lose my taste for dismissing coincidence at face value, and if I had to make a guess I’d say there was a better chance than not that someone was keeping the old cosmic car from veering into a ditch.  However, I’m also pretty sure that every now and then the man upstairs does fall asleep on the job, and when he does it’s usually the biggest, the strongest, the fastest of us mortals who wrangle the wheel.  But I like to think that sometimes, just sometimes, when He nods off, He maybe dreams of a co-pilot he can trust.

#

“All that glisters may not be gold, but at least it contains free electrons.”

T..                   John Bernal

#

Chris grew up sharing a two-bedroom house with a mom, a dad, a dog, an older sister, and his twin older brothers.  His parents had their own bedroom, and his sister, being a girl who needed her own space, got the other bedroom.  So Chris and his brothers rotated between the couch and the floor in the living room for about a year until their dad, Joe, could finish converting the garage into a kind of half-bedroom, half-workshop.

Joe made furniture and customized Harleys for extra cash when he wasn’t putting in his fifty to sixty hours a week as a clerk at 7-11 or Walgreen’s or any of the other minimum-wage jobs he was left qualified for, once Boeing moved half their machining department overseas.

Joe had been turning lathes at Boeing for over eleven years, so he did get a decent severance package—not quite a golden parachute, though no lead balloon, either.  But with a wife and four kids, money went pretty quick.  Two years after Joe’s job immigrated to Mexico, the Rains family moved from a white-picket, four-bedroom/three-bath near where I was going up, to a chain-link, two-bedroom/one-bath across town.  Not long after that, Chris’s folks filed for bankruptcy.

At the time, unlike Chris, I was hardly aware of much more than whether or not my shoes were tied, but I still noticed my parents seeing less and less of Chris’s, even though they had only moved twenty-five minutes away—a trip not half as long as the evening news.

I can remember big Rains and Wright gatherings—barbeques and birthday parties, and nights when the grown-ups would hire a sitter and have grown-ups’ night out at some restaurant where they didn’t keep booster-seats and Dixie Cups of crayons at the host stand.  And there’d also been Mariner’s games, trips to Woodland Park Zoo, movies maybe once a month…but after Chris moved, all those kinds of things just seemed to evaporate for his family.

Eventually, our folks drifted until they reached a state of casual acquaintance.  My mom would sometimes chat his mom up for a bit when one of them dropped me off, or my dad might chew the fat a bit with his, usually right about the time our family car happened to be making some funny noises in third gear, but that was about it.

Sometimes my old man would invite Joe to stay for dinner, and each time Joe would politely decline, saying that it was rib night or something, and if he went and spoiled his appetite he’d be up the creek without a canoe.  I’d glance over at Chris, wondering what his dad was talking about, and there he’d be, head down, quietly unraveling a few ratty threads on the hem of one of his ever-frayed tee-shirts.

Finally, even these polite exchanges stopped, and instead our parents would just pull up and toot their horns to let one of us know it was time to go home.

#

The Rains residence was categorically diminutive for a family of six, but not long after they started living there Chris’s parents decided they needed to add yet another resident.

Out behind the house, alongside the garage, was a good-sized yard where Chris’s dad tried to get a lawn going every summer—even though it would always be a dusty, yellow patch by the end of August—and his mom tried to start a garden more than once.  And over the wall at the back of the yard was an alleyway that ran the entire length of the block.

Their new neighborhood, even though it was no more than three or four miles removed from their old one, was now on the wrong side of First Hill, and a world away when it came to things like crime statistics and what you could leave in your car overnight and still expect to find there in the morning.  Within a year of moving in, despite any deadbolts or bars on windows, their house was robbed at least six or seven times.

One day, Chris and his oldest brother, Sean, came home from an afternoon at the arcade to find a skinny shirtless man with long, stringy yellow hair poised halfway out the back window of their parents’ room.  He had our family’s answering machine tucked under one arm, along with I/C adapter stuffed into the back pocket of his jeans.  Sean asked him who he was and the man looked at Sean and said, “Satan,” then laughed and sprang out the window and over the back wall.

That was as far as Chris’s parents let things go.  Even though it meant another mouth to manage, they went out the next day and brought home a four week old German shepherd, bought in their local Safeway parking lot, where a guy was selling puppies out of a cardboard box for twenty bucks apiece.  Zeus, which is what the family decided to call him after a long debate at the dinner table that night, was 15 pounds when they bought him, but a year later he was a trespasser’s worst nightmare at 120 fluffy pounds and still growing.  And while the four-legged bear trap did make their tiny house even more crowded, he also kept the place a lot less robbed.

The garage at the Rains house was plenty big for three small boys, provided they were all sleeping, and provided they were all normal.  But at a very early age, Chris discovered the kind of reading that was a tad more compelling than Dick and Jane’s adventures in the present tense.  I’m pretty sure he’d read all seven Narnia books twice and graduated to The Lord of the Rings before I’d even so much as cracked The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.  And when he wanted a quiet spot where he could lose himself in a book for a few hours on a rainy afternoon, it usually meant he had to contend with his two older brothers (and a few of their friends) all wired on Slurpees and Skittles, while they shouted obscenities and wore out their thumbs playing Nintendo.  So he often read at the kitchen table, unless it was his mom’s “holy hour” and she was watching “Days of Our Lives,” in which case he’d wind up sitting on the edge of the tub in the bathroom with a book across his knees.

But if it wasn’t raining, which if you know Seattle is a little less than likely on a given day, you might find him in the far corner of the backyard, sitting on top the woodpile with Zeus sprawled out in the dirt close by.  His back would be propped up against the corner of the brick wall, and his face would be pressed so close to the pages of his book that when he lifted his head, you half expected him to have ink smudges on the tip of his nose.

#

I think Chris was in the third grade when it became plain he was a step or two ahead of his class.  During one Parent’s Night conference, his teacher inquired as to what Chris’s home life was like—more specifically, what kind of studying environment they were providing him with.  When they described the size of their house and their general living conditions and means, his teacher considered it a tiny miracle the boy was able to get any studying done at all, let alone score a set perfect standard-battery test scores, like he had taken home only the week before.  She told them that if they wanted to hold open as many doors as possible for their child, they’d have to find a way to provide him a little well-lighted space to call his own.

And so, six months later, Mr. and Mrs. Rains somehow came up with the money and plunked it all down for an old Airstream trailer—one of the smaller models a three-cylinder Toyota could probably tow up and over the Rockies without seeing a cloud of steam flying out from under your hood—and planted it in their back yard between the garage and the woodpile.  The big silver box wasn’t exactly in what you might call factory condition.  The tires were nearly flat and its aluminum shell was dull and scratched and dented all to hell, but his dad made it pretty livable with a few coats of white Rustoleum, some weather-stripping and a little fresh latex acrylic for the seams.  His mom added the final touch with some Star Wars curtains she’d sewn, cut from a set of thrift store sheets.  An extension cord that ran from the garage workshop powered his lights, a small cassette player so he could listen to books on tape while he did his math homework, and a small 300 watt space-heater, which wasn’t good for much when the mercury hovered down in the twenties.

The thing was a sweat-box in the summer, an ice-box in the winter, and an all around shit-box now that I think back on it, but it was all Chris’s, and his folks let him stay up as late as he wanted, just so long as he was reading.  I never knew him to sleep much then, and he never overheard a single word about the price of a kilowatt.

Years later, Chris’s parents let it slip that they’d bought the trailer from the King County Department of Corrections.  In its former life, prisoners and their spouses had held their conjugal visitations in it for about fifteen years.  I find it kind of funny that a mind so keen it called into question the outer limits of science for more than a few physicists, astronomers, and AI, actually flourished in the very same place where hardened cons had undoubtedly made unpleasant work for prison laundry personnel since before Chris was even born.

Chris had never known where the trailer came from, but he always knew his parents had paid for it by pawning his mother’s diamond engagement ring.  When she stopped wearing it, he noticed.  He never asked about.  He didn’t need to.  I’m not sure what’s more interesting—that he would notice something like that it such an early age, or that he was wise enough not to bring it up to his folks.

That diamond, unfortunately, she never got back.  But there were others.

#

I thought the old Airstream was the bee’s knees, Chris’s own little clubhouse.  It was cozy, lack of central air and heating aside, and sleepovers were more like campouts.  There was a bunk at each end, a table with small benches in the middle, and long after lights out we’d be up, talking and talking, some nights till it was almost time for pancakes.  In our elementary school days, conversations revolved around things like latest crushes, or just how big a planet, precisely, the Death Star was capable of blowing up.

But as we got older, I’d find myself talking less during those late hours and listening a lot more.  He’d go on and on about whatever he’d been reading up on lately, and, I’d just let him.   I never got tired learning about the wonders modern science would one day be bringing to all of humanity, from cars running on air to computers composing arias.

One night—I can’t remember just how old we were—he talked about how in one of the books he’d been reading, it said in the not too distant future, people will be able to turn things like turn grass clippings and broken glass into T-Bones and medicine.  Trash will become treasure, and anyone who wanted could turn water into wine.  That was the first time I ever heard the word “nanotechnology,” and that book he was talking about, of course, had been Engines of Creation, by K. Eric Drexler.

#

Chris’s grammar school years were pretty much a cakewalk, notwithstanding a chicken-pox outbreak among our classmates in the Seventh Grade, which seemed to hit him worst of all.  But in high school Chris had a very rude awakening waiting for him.  It didn’t take him long to learn what none of his science or nature books could have taught him, something not a single one of his math books had ever touched upon:  having an Airstream trailer for a bedroom wasn’t considered all that cool by his new pool of peers.  Suddenly there were certain things mattering that never used to.  Until then, neither of us had paid much attention to what we were wearing, or if it even fit right, and here we were now, sharing a lunchroom with Hellspawn and their clothing allowance conversations. 

It might have counted for something that Chris could read Greek and Latin and a good deal of Sanskrit, or that he had a 4.0 GPA, or that he could do vector calculus in his head.  But once it got around that the pillow he rested his head on was in something mobile, there was nothing to be done.  Chris became plain old trailer-trash.  Signed, sealed, delivered.  And while no one ever called him that to his face, I did overhear a kid here and there throw the term around behind his back more times than I’d wish to remember.

The way he dressed didn’t help the situation much, either.  Granted, a few of his shirts were old enough that in just another five years or so they’d go from being nerdy to being ironic-hipster or vintage or retro, what have you, and fetch ten times what his mom had paid for them at the Salvation Army or Goodwill.  But most of his clothes were just hopeless second-hand hand-me-downs, about as likely to come back in style as luxury air travel in a hydrogen-filled zeppelin.

My parents could afford sending me to school in the appropriate camouflage—nothing I’d get beat up for, and nothing I’d get beat up over.  But Chris, in pants with a patch over one knee and cuffs that rose so high he looked ready to contend with a broken levee, he was about as unremarkable as a blue whale skateboarding through a snowfield.

There was this day Chris and I were in computer class, and he had one leg crossed sideways over his knee so that you could see the bottom of his shoe.  All of a sudden this guy Mark Prachtin, a maximal specimen of intellectual infertility, as Chris used to refer to him, leaned over and said in his outside voice, “Hey, Chris—is that cardboard in the bottom of your shoes?”  It was.  Through the hole Chris had worn in the sole of his Keds, you could see that he’d slipped a bit of cardboard in to keep the concrete from tearing up his socks.  Mark started howling with laughter, and soon half the class had joined in.  Chris just sat there stone-faced and took it.  He didn’t take his foot down until the bell rang, either.  He left it up there for anyone to see.

Later in the cafeteria, and for days after, jeering chants of “Cardboard Chris!  Cardboard Chris!” came from the tables where all the jocks and birdhouse builders invariably had lunch.  And guys twice his size would amuse their friends by bringing a piece of cardboard cut into the shape of a shoe over to Chris’s table, saying their dad owned a cardboard box factory and that piece was extra-corrugated for those rough surfaces, or it had been cut from a box that had just been made the day before.

The nickname stuck for months, long after he’d walked a mile in a brand new pair of Chuck Taylors, till eventually it took on its more economical, easier to remember form, and he became, simply, “Cardboard.”

#

Living in a trailer was one thing, but it didn’t make Chris any more friends when it got around that sometimes his parents sent him to school with a Thermos full of tap water and sandwiches that were just mustard between two slices of bread, maybe some government cheese thrown in as well towards the beginning of the month.  Every now he’d open his lunchbox to find nothing but an envelope with fifty cents for a carton of milk and an IOU from his mom for a Happy Meal, just as soon as their yard sale ended the coming weekend.  It seemed like they had at least one yard sale every month, which I always found strange, since I thought they’d have to run out of things to sell eventually.

On those days when all he had to eat was little more than a promissory notes, I’d offer to share whatever I had, but he’d just get some packets of ketchup and Saltines from the cafeteria and make tiny sandwiches.  He always said it was good and I should try one.  He claimed they tasted kind of like French fries, but I just took his word for it.  Damn skinny kid he was.

One might imagine all that name-calling and laughter behind his back, not to mention all those days of going hungry, might have got to Chris, maybe turned his spirit sour.  But I think most of the time he was too busy pondering missing neutrinos and general relativity to pay much mind to what people were thinking of him.  He had better things to carry with him through life than grudges.

It also seemed like he had better things to do than complain.  He never once made any mention of the nutritional shortcomings of his diet.  It was like he could just will away hunger back then.  And I believe his constant trips to the library, where there was always something to feed his head, compensated for whatever physical nourishment he went without.  The library was his church, and he religiously went twice a week, riding there and back on this Franken-cycle he’d built all by himself using parts from several other bikes he’d cannibalized then painted to match.  It was pretty cool, actually—sturdy and black, with airbrushed flames his dad had done on the chain-guard.  He’d pedal to the library with a milk-crate full of digested books tied to the back of the bike, only to come home with another load to pore over.

It never cost him anything but time and sweat, and since he could knock out what was a week’s worth of homework for most other kids in about two hours, he always had plenty of both to spare.  Before he graduated high school, he had blazed his way through the local library branch’s catalogue of science and nature books.  When he wanted a change of pace he’d skim through a few texts on Economics and History and Sociology, and a good sci-fi novel always seemed good for purging his palate, but none of it held a candle to the tangible world, and he soon began digging through the library system’s central database, having books shipped in from other locations all around—first city branches and then county.  He even started checking out the more obscure science journals and magazines I’d never seen on any 7-11 newsstand, in addition to mainstreams like Omni and Popular Mechanics.  Things like Applied Physics Monthly and Singularity Today.  By the time he was old enough to legally drive, he was a veritable living reference for all things quantifiable and/or theoretical.  His body may have been lanky and his movements a bit awkward and clumsy on the P.E. field at times, but his mind was fluid, elastic, and agile.  It was also, as I would later come to learn, nothing short of dangerous.

Another thing Chris did more and more as he got older was help his dad work on motorcycles.  Reading was one thing, but turning bolts and tuning carburetors was a whole other universe entirely.  It wasn’t grappling with abstracts and twisting theory; it was hands-on, grit under your fingernails, callous-thickening, knuckle-bashing, hard goddamn work.  It also taught him the patience that proved so vital later in life, when the processes inherent in experimentation called for hours, days, and in some cases years between steps.

When he was eight his dad would let him help change the family car’s oil.  When he was nine his dad began teaching him how to rebuild a clutch flywheel and, he’d go along on trips to the auto parts store with him, explaining all the while what it was they were getting and how exactly they were going to use it.  And by age ten Chris could break down a motorcycle engine and put it back together without so much as glimpsing at a shop manual.  It made little difference if he’d worked on a particular make and model before.  Harley, BMW, Suzuki, Honda—they all obeyed the same system in his eyes.  He could look past any differences in design and engineering, no matter how subtle or dramatic, and see each part for what it was in terms of function and how it fit into the larger picture.  Logical orders just opened up to him without the slightest resistance.  It was almost like he could just talk to all the little pieces of metal and neoprene and fiberglass, and they’d tell him where they came from, where they belonged, and where they wanted to go.

I used to go over to his house and keep him company while he worked.  I can’t tell you a single thing we ever talked about during those hours, if we even did talk.  All I can really remember is how in the moment he’d be, completely focused on the current task.  But when he moved on to the next step, there was   no lag time.  The chain of events was always fluid.  An afternoon of me watching him work was engrossing enough for both of us in and of itself.  I don’t think either of us ever really felt a great need for idle talk.

And his dad was glad for the help.  Joe got twice as much work done, which let him concentrate more on the better paying cosmetic jobs that came his way, like painting gas tanks with custom graphics and re-chroming tailpipes.  He also got to spend more time with a son who was smart enough to give free tax advice to most anyone while they worked.  During Chris’s high school days, while other kids went to hang out at the mall, Chris might be in the garage with his dad, reassembling a V-twin engine.  But as gifted as Chris was, I’d say Joe never once exploited his son’s talents for even the smallest amount of extra cash.  He saw to it that Chris’s studies always had and always would come first, any time in the garage had to be his own.  That was the rule.

#

When I think back on the way Chris came up, one thing that still juts out among my collection of otherwise opaque and muted memories is this poster his family had paid money to frame, which they hung on the bathroom wall.  It’s one you might have seen, perhaps in a novelty or gift shop somewhere.  There’s this man all outfitted in equestrian get-up, with leather riding crop tucked in the crook of one arm and a fluted glass of champagne held up in toast by his other.  His chin is held high where he stands in front of an estate house, one of his gleaming knee-high boots resting easy on the bumper of a burnished Rolls Royce.  And at the bottom of the poster it reads:  “Poverty Sucks.”

When I was a kid, I thought Chris’s parents put that poster up because the guy in it just looked so dumb standing there with his ridiculous hat on.  I didn’t think of poverty as having anything to do with them.  I actually think I could read the word long before I began to understand what it meant.  When I thought poverty back then, I only thought starving kids in third-world countries—the kind of kids my parents would remind me of whenever I refused to finish my fish cauliflower.  It would be a long string of years before I came to think of poverty as something that could be waged war on, let alone with.

I think I understand now the reason they had it up.  It’s the same reason I’d laughed out loud one day in the Eleventh Grade when I knew I shouldn’t have.  A good friend of mine, Carrie, came up to me at school one day and pulled me aside, and then took off the aviator sunglasses she was wearing for a moment, revealing nets of bright, broken vessels crowding the whites of her still-bright, but swollen and bruised blue eyes.  She told me that her uncle had done it when he caught her sneaking a few of his Marlboro Reds.  I laughed in Carrie’s face, and Chris’s parents hung that poster up, because every so often, the world wears a face so terrible, so marred with anger, that laughter is about all a body can respond with.  I’m not sure what happened to that poster, but I think I might have seen it at one of their garage sales, lacquered oak frame and all, going for one almighty dollar.

I might be making Chris out to be an absolute nerd.  But despite his disregard for fashion or cultivating a sense of style, he was able get a girlfriend from time to time.  And he could certainly hold his own better than I ever could in most any conversation, so long as the topic wasn’t the NFL draft first round picks; he just couldn’t be bothered with the smaller rules of social engagement everyone else seemed to think were critical to survival.  He even learned to find time between all the reading and extracurricular activities for three or four steady relationships before he left high school in his wake.

When we were freshmen, there was one girl who asked him to prom.  She was a senior no less, which made it something you didn’t hear about too often—and no hag as I recall.  When he asked what he had to wear, she said not to worry.  He didn’t have to rent a tux or anything, he could just wear a suit and tie and that’d be fine.

When he turned her down and then told me about it, I was surprised until he said, “Shit, man.  I’m lucky to have two shirts with buttons right now.  Where the hell am I gonna get a suit?”

Math and science were an endless escape for Chris.  Not just from the lumps he took at school, but from the powdered milk and no cable at home, as well.  If he had a book or some impossible equation to dive into, it didn’t really matter what was or wasn’t in the pantry or on ABC.  And who knows?  Maybe I wouldn’t be sitting here, talking about Chris if he’d had his MTV and WWF like everyone else.

I used to wonder why he didn’t just take some test and skip high school, go right into college, and get an early start on life.  He might have skipped junior high as well, if it had ever been something he really wanted.  His guidance counselors suggested, and I was there on more than one occasion his parents brought it up.

I asked him about taking the test one and he said, “If I did that, I don’t think I’d get to hang out with you every day.”  It was something that spoken aloud should have sounded like a joke, but he said it like he meant it.  “Besides,” he said, “high school sucks ass, but it ain’t that bad.  I gotta put up with a few shit-heads, but it gives me a lot of spare time.  And have you ever listened to one of those kids who is trying to get a PhD at like fifteen try and connect with the rest of the world?  I’ll admit, I may be a little weird compared to most of the kids at school, but those guys—” He tapped a finger to the side of his head.  “Talk about mental.”

It seems he did his best to hide what he must have always known he was.  And he might have kept it hidden well into his silver years, but it was never up to him.  There were certain individuals he never could have known existed, who took notice of him long before any university admissions department would come to know his name.  Chris had been recruited by the military, and he’d never even kissed a girl.  They had plans for him, and they took no issue with placing their nation’s best interests above Chris’s own.  But what these people never would have guessed, let alone believed, was that by the time they got a hold of him, Chris had made a few plans for them, as well.

By the second month of his senior year, when most of us in the class of ’94 were shelling out parental cabbage for the Princeton Review and sweating over practice quizzes in Kaplan’s SAT prep-books, Chris had already been accepted with full scholarship, room and board included, to every school he’d applied to, mostly Ivy Leagues.  I think he only applied to all those schools, though, to prove to himself he could get in—part of him probably just wanted to know he was as good as anyone—because he wound up staying in Seattle and going with me to the University of Washington.  He also chose to live at home and gave his room and board allowance to his parents.  His sister still lived there, but his brothers had both moved out by then, and he had the back of the garage all to himself.  The trailer was still there, but now it was more or less a guest room for when his brothers came home to visit.  Chris’s parents refused the room and board money at first, but when he insisted they took it and opened a savings account for him.  Four years later, when he left for MIT, they gave it all back.

He had a broad interest in particle physics and engineering, and dabbled heavily in computer science, but nanotech, specifically, had really snared his curiosity.  Ever since he’d read Engines of Creation, it was about the only thing that really turned his crank.  Chris read truckloads of other books and articles on the subject, but the notions, enthusiasm, and palpable optimism of Eric Drexler sparked Chris’s flush imagination in ways no other subject up to then had.  Around the time we were applying to schools, the University of Washington had recently received a generous amount of government funding for nanotech research, and when Chris met with their director of undergraduate admissions, the man made it out to sound like Chris’s transcript would pretty much give him the run of the place if he went there.  He could float around, drawing on classes in electrical engineering, math (everything from chaos theory to fractals), biological engineering, chemistry (organic as well as biological and inorganic), quantum physics—anything he thought might be useful in his quest for whatever breakthrough he was after.  And, for reasons I didn’t quite understand at the time, he chose the University of Washington over free rides to schools like Harvard, Yale, and Brown.

I was glad he chose UW.  In small part because I thought the social pressures and academic expectations of an Ivy League school might warp and shrivel his spirit to a dim cinder before his first year was over—which I’m sure now I was completely wrong about—but mostly because, out of the seven schools I’d sent applications to, UW was the only one that would have me.  And, since the idea of going from what was essentially a hangout for 800 kids to an institution with 35,000 adults more or less terrified me, I wanted at least one person there I knew.  Even if we didn’t have any classes together, Chris and I could still meet up for a slice in the student union building and compare notes on what we were going through.

I guess I should probably mention that languages came just as easily for Chris as math and science, and in his spare time he soaked up any vernacular that rang easy on his ear.  Like with motorcycles, languages were just closed systems to him, and they all shared many of the same sets of rules.  By the time he got to UW, he could hold rudimentary conversation in German, Spanish, Arabic, and Russian, ask for directions in several other languages, and say hello and goodbye in no less than two dozen.  When he began writing computer code, it was simply working with another language, another variation on otherwise familiar orders.  He’d also done his own translations of The Iliad and everything Cicero and Seneca had ever written.  And, just because he knew it would make his old man proud, red-blooded Celt that he was, Chris made a point to memorize a handful of Irish proverbs in their original Gaelic.  By the time I got to UW I could at last save the Princess on Super Mario Bros. without dying once.

When he graduated and finally did leave Seattle, it was for nowhere else but MIT.  Competition was fierce, of course, but it was no surprise to me, nor his family, when recruiters began contacting him at the start of his junior year.  Over the previous summer, he’d won a national science award for a paper he wrote on non-covalent intermolecular forces.  It hadn’t even been an school assignment, just something he’d taken a passing interest in while researching a totally unrelated subject, and he decided to submit a few of his more interesting incidental findings.  It wasn’t exactly virgin territory, but his ideas did expand on existing theory in ways none of his professors had clued into yet, but appeared shamefully obvious to them in retrospect.  They published his findings in some esoteric science journal, the kind with a circulation in the hundreds, and he got a $500 prize.  So when he headed off to what he called “greener grazing grounds,” I wasn’t so worried about him getting lost in some establishment shuffle, anymore.  The man needed more room to grow.  It was time for him to move on, and MIT seemed to be the only bowl big enough for a goldfish like him.

In our last year at UW, he’d mentioned to me a few times, in hushed and confidential tones, when I could manage to drag him away from the lab for a quick beer or some Frisbee in the quad, that he was close to making an amazing breakthrough, but he wouldn’t say what it had to do with, other than it had to do with “Everything.”  I’d wonder whether he didn’t want to bore me with a bunch of physics jargon, or whether the explanation was so complicated that he didn’t know how to tell me.  But for all I knew he could have just gone a little Don Quixote from too many hours spent at computer terminals and hunched over science books and circuit boards.

He said this breakthrough wasn’t something he was really working on in the lab; he was putting it together in his head, because a few of the pieces didn’t even exist, yet, but he knew they were possible.  He was too afraid to put any of it into writing.  Said he couldn’t risk anyone stealing his ideas, his work.  It would be years before I’d have any idea what he was talking about.  But he was right not to tell me, because, as brilliant as he was, I probably would have just laughed him off as delusional.  He was also right not write anything down.  If anyone but Chris had figured out what he eventually did, I’m sure all they would have done is try to come up with the best way to turn a profit with it.  They’d be out to make a killing, and it would be genocide on Wall Street, so to speak.

Chris, however, had something besides his bank balance in mind all along.  He wanted to do the last thing that might be expected of someone who grew up drinking tumblers of tap-water some days just to trick his stomach into feeling full.  Most people would have told him he was crazy, but he didn’t want to make money at all.

He wanted to unmake money.

He wanted to forever unravel the abstract, illusory mesh that maintains the notion of property and assigns arbitrary values to scraps of dyed paper.  He wanted to find an antidote for the collective hallucination that would have people see silver as more valuable than copper and spoon-feed the Invisible Hand of the Market.  He wanted to pull the plug on a system that had taken wealth and welfare under its wing, and then set them a page apart in the dictionary.  He wanted to level the playing field for everyone with a Caterpillar tractor the size of Texas.  In short, he wanted to break the Spell. 

Of course, I hadn’t a clue about any of this of this back then.  All I knew was that he truly believed he was up to some serious business, and it might be a bit risky, even for him.  At worst it might be something that could either blow him up or land him in jail if he wasn’t careful.  But I never would have imagined just how big a target he was leveling in his sights.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

#

At MIT he wound up doing pretty much the same thing he’d done at UW, which was whatever he damn well pleased.  He took classes ala carte and did mostly independent study courses under the direction of several different professors, only the curriculum was more specific than it had been at the university, and the departments he drifted back and forth between had much better funding all around.  When he needed access to a computer that could perform an unfathomable host of calculations per second, or a few hundred meters of high-grade gold micro-monofilament—which can run into the thousands per meter—all he had to do was put in a requisition and then sign for it.

While he was out there we’d email back and forth, the occasional birthday or Christmas card aside, which we’d send the old-fashioned way.  The time stamps on his messages were invariably between four and seven AM his time, and I often wondered if he was just waking up when he wrote them, or if he hadn’t even gone to sleep yet (or if he ever even slept at all), but I never remembered to ask.  He never talked about what he was working on at the moment.  Nothing in detail, anyway.  He’d mostly write about Cambridge and what it was like to live somewhere that saw a real winter.  And girls, too.  He wrote about girls all the time.  Somehow he managed his schedule to accommodate semi-regular nights of dinner and drinks with his math and physics colleagues.  It seemed he’d finally found a place where he kind of in, where a refined intellect wasn’t an instant turn-off for the opposite sex.  He dated several women until, at the start of his second year, he settled into a one-bedroom apartment with a Harvard grad student named Willa, christened after the poet Willa Cather, who was supposed to be a distant relation of hers.  Chris just called her Will.  She was working on her dissertation in American History, focusing on the rich territory between Kennedy’s inauguration and Nixon’s resignation.  Chris never talked about marriage or anything, but on the odd occasions when I could raise him on the land-line at their apartment (he refused to get a cell), which grew even fewer and farther between in the months before his disappearance, I could hear it in his voice that he was happier than he’d ever been in his life.

He rarely visited home on breaks.  Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Mother’s Day were about it.  He said he just couldn’t afford to be away from the lab for very long.  When he wasn’t managing a project for one of his professors who might be off at a conference, or working on a current assignment, he was taking advantage of the free facilities available to him, hammering away at some of his own theories.  It was only during semester breaks that he was allowed weekday access, instead of just at night and on the odd available weekend.

Chris’s parents had me over for dinner a few times while he was out there.  I’d always liked them and wanted to stay in touch, and his mom’s cooking may have been simple, but the first bite never failed at bringing me a contented sigh.  His parents said they understood how busy he was and how important his work must be, and surely he was only doing what God put him on Earth for.  They pretended not to mind too much, but there were often gaps in our table-conversation, gaps that everyone knew Chris would have filled with a bad joke or a good bit of trivia, and it was like listening to a player-piano with few dead keys plunk out a sunny song.

As time went on, his emails got shorter and shorter, sometimes amounting to nothing more than a few words and an initial.  A few weeks before the end of his second year I got an email from him with just this in the body:

A—

Close as hell now, I think.  If I’m right, I may be home for good very soon.

—C

And that was it.  I wrote to him twice in the next week but got nothing back.  At first I just supposed he was still in his honeymoon phase with Will, and they were spending as much time together as possible.  But then I remembered how, on more than one occasion during college, I’d seen him wholly immersed in a problem to the point where he’d completely forget to shower, or even change his clothes for three or four days, and I’d have to find the most tactful way of bringing it to his attention that even Zeus was vacating rooms when he came in.  So I considered it entire possible he was bogged down in one or more lab projects, decoding whatever new quantum leap of imagination he’d made that month.

A week or so after I got Chris’s last message, however, his father called, asking if I’d heard from the boy genius lately.  Chris hadn’t shown up for any of his classes in days, and no one he’d been working with had seen him.  On top of that, Joe had got a call from Will’s mother, who lived just over the Longfellow Bridge in Boston.

She and Joe had never met, but had been in fairly regular contact about two months before, when her family and Chris’s were conspiring on what to get him for a birthday present.  They wound up pitching in for a framed page from a 1726 edition of Principia Mathematica by Sir Isaac Newton, which they tracked down through a London antiquities dealer.

I thought it was a bit strange, that someone would sell a book page by page.  It reminded me of something I heard about when I was bellman at the Hotel Edgewater my first year out of college.  The Beatles stayed there once when they played the Seattle Center Coliseum, back before Key Bank bought the venue and named it after themselves.  And when the Fab Four checked out, some on-the-ball businessman from MacDougall’s department store downtown bought the carpet out of the room they’d stayed in.  He cut it up and sold the scraps as souvenirs.  Made a serious profit in the bargain, too.

Now, I’m not saying I would ever equate the document by which Newton defined his laws of motion and universal gravitation and formed the foundation of classical mechanics, with a section of Berber even the Walrus himself set the Cuban-heels of his pointy boots on, but I’ve since chewed the notion, from time to time, that something could be worth more after it’s been broken.

Anyway, Will’s mom told Joe she’d stopped by their apartment several times in the past few days, since they hadn’t been answering their phone or returning any of her messages, which wasn’t like either of them, as she’d had plenty of returned calls from Chris if Will was busy.  She asked Joe if Chris had maybe mentioned anything to him about the two of them taking a trip somewhere.  He said no, and when he called me he said she sounded more than a little worried.  He told her not to fret over it, that it was probably nothing, and threw out the idea that they eloped, which gave her a bit of a chuckle.  I told Joe that Chris hadn’t made any mention of anything to me, but for all I knew Chris was pretty smitten, and eloping wasn’t a bad guess.  I also told him about Chris’s last email and said that if I heard from Chris again, I’d have them both call home right away.

The day after that, Will’s mom, still upset, went by their apartment with some mail to drop off for Will.  When she knocked repeatedly and no one answered she tried to peer in through one of the front windows, but the blinds and curtains were down.  That was when she heard Newt, their cat, with his long and tired meows.  She was sure the creature was starving.

The apartment was on the first floor, so she walked to the side of the building, found a gate unlatched, and went to a back window.  The kitchen was at the back of the apartment, and one of the blinds was up an inch or two.  It was dark inside, but after cupping her hands against the glass and letting her eyes adjust she was able to see through to the living room.  Everything appeared fine.  She tapped on the glass and in a few moments Newt jumped up on the counter.  She’d never seen him so skinny.

So, she took out her cell phone and called the police to make a missing persons report.  They asked her if it had been more than 48 hours, which it had, and, after getting a bit more information from her, said they would have someone over shortly.  Then she went and got the building manager, who let the Massachusetts PD into the apartment.  He would have let her in if she wanted, but she was wise enough to stay out of what could be a crime scene.  After asking her as many questions as they knew and a preliminary look through the apartment, the detectives called in a forensics unit and began a thorough search.

Apart from an unmade bed, apples and bananas going rotten on the kitchen counter, a shrunken cat, a fragrant litter box, and milk that had gone off five days ago, absolutely nothing was amiss.  None of Chris and Will’s neighbors had heard anything unusual in the previous week, which did seem a little odd.  Chris and Will had a very healthy physical relationship, often during the hours a 9 to 5ers wants to be deep in REM sleep, and a few of the adjacent tenants had in the past registered noise complaints with the manager.  One of those tenants was two floors up, apparently.  At least, that’s what Chris said.

There didn’t seem to be anything of value missing, not that there was much to steal unless you traded in rare books—Will had been a collector for years—or you knew a good fence for digital calipers.  Their bags were in the closet, empty, and all of their clothes were hanging neatly in the closet.

Detectives checked their bank accounts.  Neither showed any activity for eight days, and the largest withdrawal either of them had made in the past six months was a few months ago, when Will took $250 out of hers for Chris’s birthday present.  Their mailbox was crammed full of credit card offers and pizza coupons with missing children on the backs of them.  All the DNA in the apartment belonged to one of them, Newt, or one of their friends, all of whom were questioned—until it was obvious they weren’t suspect—and then instructed to contact one of the detectives if they remembered anything at all that might be related to the case.  There were no unusual hairs or fibers, no unaccounted for fingerprints, and thankfully no John or Jane Does turning up in any of the local morgues.  Apparently, the two of them had just up and vanished like thin chimney smoke in a rough October gale.

#

For a long time after Chris disappeared, I refused to think anything.  Denial makes a great anesthetic.  That and whiskey.  And I indulged in it freely while the days drilled away.  I was set on just giving the whole thing time.  Something had to turn up.  Some trace of him and Will would eventually surface, and soon enough there’d be a trail of breadcrumbs for the police.

As it stood there was little to go on.  No suspects, no signs of forced entry or a struggle, and no one the police questioned could shed the slimmest ray of light on the investigation.  Boston’s finest put out APB’s, and there were even a few blips from the Associated Press about the mysterious disappearance of two promising young grad students, but it wasn’t a Nancy Grace story.  The case turned cold quick, and when nothing but dead-ends developed for six months straight, I realized it was time to at least begin considering the reality that I might never see Chris again.

I wasn’t able to think of Chris as being dead.  Not yet.  Extremely missing, maybe, but not dead.  And for the first few months, whenever the phone rang, part of me was sure it was him, calling to tell me all about the crazy thing that had happened to him and Will, how they’d taken mushrooms together and had a joint spiritual epiphany, and so they went to study meditation in a Buddhist monastery and took strict vows of silence as part of an initiation, and that’s why they couldn’t call or write.  Or they’d shipped out on a whaling vessel to elude gangsters because he had a secret, raging gambling addiction that put him fifteen G’s in the hole, and he had no interest in any knees that bent more ways than one, and she couldn’t stand to let him go without her, but they’d had a good season and now he could pay the mob back.

I wanted to hold on to some hope, no matter how slight, but the truth was that after a time, the darker things I could imagine began making rounds in my mind with more and more frequency, like doctors strolling a cancer ward, looking down at their clipboards in between rooms with slowly shaking heads, as they shuffle through a growing collection of bleak medical charts.  And when Chris’s family started talking about his disappearance in terms of years instead of months, it was harder and harder to believe anything but the worst.

#

I went on with my life.  The hair up top thinned away, but my auto insurance premiums dropped.  But no matter how long it had been I could never go for a week or more without thinking about Chris and will, wondering if they were alive, and if so, where on earth they could possibly be.

His parents I made a point of visiting at least once a month, sometimes for a quick “hello,” and sometimes for a Sunday dinner, where we’d spend most of the meal talking about Chris, sharing things about him we never used to bring up—not because they were meant to be dark secrets, but because they were the kinds of things, ordinary, everyday things, that only seemed to matter after a person is gone.  Like how some nights when he was at the U and he was so busy towards the end of the term that his dinner was usually a jar of peanut butter, a glass of chocolate milk, and a spoon.  Or how he always came out of the bathroom with his fly unzipped, and his dad would ask him if he had a license to sell hot dogs, which Chris never ceased to find hysterical.  I told his parents a few things that they didn’t know about, too.  Like how he started forging his mom’s handwriting in the Fifth Grade and leaving school early, just so he could spend a few extra hours at the library before the streetlights came on.  It made them both laugh.

I guess I kept visiting them because, while it may be true that misery does love company, the same can also be said of hope.  It was all I could really do—for them, and for myself.

Through all this time I did what most people do with a BA in English.  I took jobs having absolutely nothing to do with anything regarding critical theory, grammar, MLA format, poetry analysis, structure, or period and genre differentiation and identification.  I waited tables, delivered pizza, parked cars, schlepped luggage, gently abused customers from behind a video store counter, and tried out at least half a dozen other soul-sucking jobs not worth mentioning, all while I attracted formidable array of rejection letters from every magazine, agent, and publishing house I sent my short stories out to.

Sometimes, when I had a load on my mind and no one to talk to about it, I would also write emails to Chris.  It seemed no one ever closed his Gmail account.  Nothing I sent ever came back courtesy of the Mailer-Daemon, anyway.  I’d tell him the latest with me and with his family.  One of his brothers almost got married, but backed out at the last minute when he found out his bride to be was wanted as an accessory to murder in Mexico.  His dad found a job that paid pretty well, re-machining cylinder heads out of classic cars at a local restoration shop.  I wrote to him when Zeus died, peacefully in his sleep.  The whole family got together and buried the old boy in the backyard next to the woodpile Chris used to sit on top of, right in the spot where Zeus used to lay in the half dead grass and keep him company while he read.

Even though Chris never wrote back, I’d usually feel better, because I could imagine exactly what he’d say to me—some little thing that would put my mind at ease enough for me to see whatever was keeping me up more clearly, make some better sense of it, and maybe even laugh at it.

And, on occasion, I even dared to think that maybe, just maybe, he was safe and sound somewhere, reading everything I wrote with a smile and, for reasons I had yet to learn, he couldn’t write back.

#