“This seat taken?”
The stack of lab books takes up the space next to me at the counter. Marsh Road Diner is hopping. Once a month Sam Omura and I meet in Wilmington, vectors from where we live, his short, mine long, no isosceles. Sam knows vectors, electrical engineering, now working on secret something for CIA space labs, satellite surveillance for the Cold War.
“Sam! Sorry about that.”
“You’re a dull boy, Song.” Still lean and short, his dark hair with no signs of gray, he bellies up to the counter, King of Smart Guys, PhD from Stanford, grad student who taught me when I did undergrad. Nobody taught vectors the way he did. With fifteen sharks for students in the class, he turned out the lab lights, turned on lasers, cut the competitive crap out of the class. Sharks forgot our GPAs, GREs, and pedigrees. Nothing like this teacher.
We shake hands once I move the lab books from the Misfits of Science.
“How’s Sheila?” Start with the family, start soft, get harder.
“Still inventing stuff,” he says. He turns his head to me, and his dark eyes, with their bushy eyebrows, are bright. He and Sheila have been together ten years, and she’s turned ones and zeroes into codes that make machines calculate almost faster than humans can.
“My two favorite scientists,” our waitress says with a coffee thermos in her hand.
Sam can never resist. “Where have you been all my life, Nancy?”
“Waiting for you, doll.” She turns over the mugs and pours coffee. “What’ll you have?” She never writes our orders down. After we call out the same things we order every time, we shake our heads at the news we hadn’t talked about since last month.
“Two hundred sixty-nine people, gone.”
“Anything you can tell me about that? I know you’re not supposed to.”
“CIA’s not involved.” He never likes to talk about where he works. His lab does contracts. “But I can tell you it looks like a colossal mistake. The jetliner went 300 miles off course.” He shakes his head, whistles under his breath at the stupidity.
“Any reason?”
“Nobody knows as of yet. We had surveillance in the air, but not nearby.”
Behind the counter the waitresses dodge each other, post the orders for the cooks, grab dishes after the cooks ring the bells, slosh coffee into cups.
“Speaking of unknowable, is Dorothy White still kicking around that place?” Sam hasn’t been back to Tim-Tim’s since he graduated. His family worked the fields near the school, came back after the prison camps during the war. Even though Sam missed years of formal education, he scored the highest of all kids in Delaware on the aptitude tests, and the Du Ponts wanted him in, felt guilty for the imprisonment. Sam was the first Japanese American at Tim-Tim’s and he blew the doors off the place, won every prize in science and music, lettered in cross-country, basketball, and tennis. Slight in build, mighty in spirit.
“Queen Busybody? Sure.”
“Need anything?” Sam drinks about half his mug of coffee in one gulp.
“You mean, in the labs?”
“No, in the dining hall.”
From beakers to Bunsen burners to microscopes to the huge shiny fume hood, Sam kept Tim-Tim’s kids in science. The Du Ponts built the lab but didn’t make it work. Sam made sure Misfits of Science could at least try the tools. On the giving scale of alumni, Sam is at the top, always setting records.
Nancy places the oval plates in front of us, pancakes and omelets so big they hang over the sides. Before I can unwrap my silverware, Sam stabs one of my sausages and pops it in his mouth.
“Thanks. Sheila doesn’t like me eating pork.”
“Help yourself,” I say. “We could use a thing or two.”
“Send me a list.” His fork is busy cutting his omelet into pieces, each piece a square. The once-floppy omelet is now an electrical panel perfectly charted.
“Say, Sam, I got a live one this year.” By the time I clear the butter off the paper divider, pour syrup, he’s eaten his way through half the omelet. The guy never gains weight. No entropy, always motion. “Hungry?”
“Always. What kind of live one?”
“The kind of kid that makes you want to bow every time you walk in the classroom.”
Sam sets down his fork. “You don’t do that, right?”
“Of course not. For instance, I’m doing particles in turbulence, and I set it up with two kids up front of the lab. Tell them to raise one arm and touch the other kid. They don’t want to. Too bad. I make them.
“I ask them how big is the force of gravity? I make them repeat after me, ‘A product of the masses of both, inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.’ Basically, not much. After I explain, the Second Formers at the front of the room about gag.
“Let me back up. Last week, Kyle is his name, all he says is ‘Oh no, Mr. Bill.’ You know that Saturday Night Live show? Down in study hall, I see him with his head plastered to the desk. I say, ‘Hey, Kyle, getting your work done?’ and he says, ‘Oh no, Mr. Bill’ really loud. At dinner, I hear he takes those boiled-to-death beans we eat. Remember those?”
“I still can’t eat beans,” Sam says.
“Well, he cuts one at a time, picks up the halves, and you know what he says.
“But even when he’s jumping off chairs and making noises, he’s watching. I see him. Into any room, he bumps, bounces, makes a grand entrance, but then sits in the back. With so much show, he’s invisible.
“In the class last week I get the Second Formers dropping cones of paper off their desks. You know how that goes. Some fall smooth. Some tumble. Then, we add tiny weights. The cones go crazy. Kids love it. I give them paper and scissors, and they cut cones out of different shapes, like snow cones and pizza pies. Only a few go Conehead on me, wearing them on their heads, talking monotone. Stupid TV.”
“I like where you’re going with that,” Sam says. The Prince. The teacher for all teachers.
“I try to talk unstable equilibrium, but they get too busy winging the cones upside down. So, I ask what it takes for the cones to find their orientation.
“We talk gravitational pull. We talk aerodynamic force. So then I dump a bag of leaves on the lab table. ‘Have at it,’ I say. ‘Make these leaves fall smooth.’ They look at me like I’m stupid.”
“They have a point.” Sam jabs me with his elbow.
“Thanks.” I know he knows what I’m talking about. “Of course they can make a leaf fall. The whole lab turns into a leaf pile, kids dropping leaves on each other, stuffing up shirts. One or two try to get the forces to match.
“‘Tell me about the shape of the leaf,’ I say.
“Three kids talk at once, ‘Pointy,’ ‘irregular,’ ‘skinny.’
“‘Right,’ I say. ‘Edges, ridges, stems. Too many variables.’ Their faces look like a Rubik’s Cube.”
“I love that look,” Sam says.
“But it’s this kid, Kyle, who says, ‘No two leaves are alike.’
“And I say, ‘So?’
“And he says, ‘Density,’ ‘weight,’ ‘surface tension.’ How does he know this stuff? And because he gets it, they get it, that the slightest variation will destabilize the equilibrium = turbulence, and there is no way for scientists to predict how or where a leaf will fall. Smart. He’s the smartest kid I’ve ever seen.”
“But they don’t like it,” Sam says, “where science ends.”
“Hate it.”
“Yeah, everybody wants science to explain every single thing.”
“It can’t.”
“Not now.”
“Not ever.”
On that note, we pay our bills, leave the money on the counter with extra big tips for Nancy. The stack of lab books is on the floor between my stool and the one next to me. I spin around, bend down to pick up the books. When I turn, Sam is standing facing me. Behind him in one of the booths by the windows, I see two kids, maybe six and seven years old. They look at me, and their hands shoot up to their eyes. They tug their eyelids, turn to each other, and smile a fake smile, talk something chink-ish. I hear, “Ahhhh, so.”
When I straighten up, look at Sam, he starts to turn around to look where I’m looking, but the kids pull their hands down, look out the window. What Sam sees is two boys looking out the window.
Slight variation of that picture, great turbulence. What do these boys know of one man Japanese, one man Korean? They see Chinese, Mr. Chan with his bicycle legs, the two of us inside when Kim played in the pool. He made me say literal, slanted, let go, always the Ls. Good men like Sam and Mr. Chan showed me equilibrium.
With so many variables, my mind spins. Equilibrium lost. Without talking to the little white boys, I walk out with Sam, walk out with the fine teacher, the one who helps restore equilibrium by talking teaching, by affirming Kyle is unusual, inyon, gift.