9
Springer-Verlag
That weekend, Corey found a building site a half mile from home, on the broad hill that came up from the water via the wide asphalt causeway with its steadily curving centerline. The site was chaos—workmen everywhere, saws screaming, wood falling and clattering, the muddy lot chockablock with trucks.
The man running the show had a stern, rugged face: big bones, sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, a Joseph Stalin mustache. In turtleneck sweater and boots, he looked like a woodsman who cut down trees all day with an axe. His pale skin was healthily lit from within, and he had an active man’s impatience with chitchat. In a Slavic voice, he told Corey, “You’re too young. I can’t use you. If you cut your thumb off, what am I going to do? Sew it back on?”
They were standing in a hallway from which it was possible to see through several doorways at once, as if into the multiple chambers of a heart—a busy crossroads point. Construction workers in heavily loaded tool belts were tramping by on the creaking plywood which served as decking underfoot. One doorway let into a gutted kitchen, where only the cabinetry remained. Two men in kneepads crawled on the floor, laying tile. In the adjacent chamber, sheets of drywall leaned on a cart with swivel wheels.
One fellow passing in the hall had a lighter step than the others: He wasn’t wearing a tool belt. He had a drill gun in his hand and a drywall screw in his mouth like a toothpick and traipsed past as if he were headed to the bar to spear another olive for his drink. Corey recognized him from Darragh’s roofing crew. His name was Dave Dunbar, and Tom had dismissed him as a joker.
“Hey, Dave! It’s Corey. You remember me from the summer?”
“Hey, chief, what’s crack-a-lackin’?”
“Can you vouch for me with him? I’m trying to get a job.”
“Yeah. Hire this kid. He’s good.”
“What can he do?”
“He can do everything. He’s a mad-dog killer.”
“Okay,” Blecic said. “Come.” He led Corey to the kitchen. “The ceiling. You see it’s black? You’re going to clean it. Take the spray.”
“Thank you!” Corey said.
The boss returned to the crossroads from which he could see everyone.
From the other room, Dunbar called, “Yo, Blecic, you better hire him.”
“Don’t give me any more bullshit today.”
“I’m not giving you any bullshit,” Dunbar said innocently. He resumed chatting with a buddy, tacking up drywall. Blecic watched obliquely, using a line of sight that, if it had been a bullet trajectory, would have made them duck for cover.
Corey went up a ladder with a bottle of degreaser and a roll of paper towels and spent the day spraying and wiping holes in the grime on the kitchen ceiling.
An hour into the job, Dave rolled through beneath him with the drywall cart, felt his head and looked up.
“Sorry. I think it dripped on you.”
“What’re you doing up there, washing it? What’s he making you do that for? They’re going to tear that whole thing out anyway. Don’t do that.”
“I’ve got to do it. He’s giving me a job.”
“No, you don’t. Tell him he’s a snapper head. You could be chilling with us, throwing up drywall.”
It was quitting time at three. The men began gathering their tools. Corey came down the ladder and set down the emptied spray bottle. Blecic paid him from a roll of cash and told him to come back.
Corey walked out with the other workmen, leaving the smell of plywood and concrete, amid shouts and laughter, the rattle and bang of toolboxes slamming into truck beds, the crunch of tires as they rolled out, stereos kicking on, engines revving as they peeled away. It was a relief to not be craning his neck after several hours. The fresh air was cold and the sun touched the shingled roofs of modest houses among the wintry trees. He followed the road with its white centerline down to the ocean.
When he got home, he showed his mother the cash and told her he’d gotten a job.
“Corey, you’re a take-charge guy.”
He hugged his mom, then asked where Leonard was so he could tell him too.
Thereafter for the entire day on Saturdays and half a day on Tuesdays, when his classes let out early, he worked for Blecic, and studied physiology in school. He was having intense conversations with his father almost every day. This period of close involvement would last approximately a month before it ended for all time. Later, Corey would realize he and his father had talked more during this brief period than they had in their entire lives. He was so captivated by Leonard during these early days of the year, he told his mother he felt as if the man was taking him on an amazing journey, which challenged everything he thought he knew.
Gloria said she was glad they were connecting. “That’s good for you. I give thanks for that.”
At the peak of his enthusiasm for Leonard, Corey defined him as an unsung hero of theoretical physics. “I see him as a tragic figure. He’s gotten cheated out of credit for his discoveries due to class bias. I want to fight for him in my own work!”
She heard out his appraisal of his father without comment.
So far, the subject of fathers had only come up once between Adrian and Corey, when Adrian asked what Corey had been doing at MIT on the night they met.
“I was looking for my father. He works there.”
“What’s he do? Is he like a professor or something?”
“He’s a cop.”
“A cop?”
“He works for the campus police. Supposedly.”
“You don’t know?”
“I think he does. I’ve never seen him at his job. But he’s been doing stuff at MIT since before I was born. He used to, like, go there.”
“He did? What did he take?”
“Physics.”
“Physics? That’s really interesting. Does he have a degree?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, I’m not that close to him. I didn’t grow up with him. My parents didn’t live together. I don’t call him ‘Dad.’ I call him by his name.”
Adrian said he wasn’t close to his father either. When he was four or five, his father had divorced his mother and gone to live in Cincinnati. Mr. Reinhardt was in real estate. He was in superb physical shape. He’d been in the Air Force and now ran three-hour marathons and played a lot of tennis.
For Adrian’s fourteenth birthday, Mr. Reinhardt had taken him on a hunting trip. On the way, they’d gone to a whorehouse to get him laid. The whorehouse was in a trailer outside the city limits. It was here that Adrian had lost his virginity. A few days later, he had started having trouble urinating.
“It was like pissing razor blades. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. My father and his hunting buddy started going, ‘Adrian’s got the—’ ” Adrian clapped his hands.
“I don’t get it.”
“They were saying I had the clap.”
“What’s that? Gonorrhea?”
“Yeah. Unfortunately.”
“And your dad was laughing?”
“He can be a mean SOB.”
When Mr. Reinhardt was in the Air Force, his unit had held regular boxing smokers behind the mess hall. If you didn’t like someone, you were encouraged to call them out and settle it with the whole platoon watching. Mr. Reinhardt had fought a lot of matches. Once, he fought a man he especially disliked. After whipping him, he picked him up, stuffed him in a trash can and rolled him down a hill. Years later, in a bar, Mr. Reinhardt heard another patron telling everyone how, in the service, he’d seen a man get beaten senseless and rolled down a hill in a trash can. Mr. Reinhardt said, “I did that! That was me!” And the storyteller declared, “That was the meanest fucking thing I ever saw anybody do!” and bought him a drink.
“What happened with the gonorrhea? Did you tell a doctor?”
“Yeah, I had to see a doctor and that wasn’t too fun. She was this big mean psycho bitch who hated men. She gives me this look and goes, ‘Take off your clothes.’ Then she took a Q-tip and stuck it in my dick. It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt, and I could tell she enjoyed it. She was getting off on it. She was smiling.”
“Oh my God.”
“I felt so violent, I could have ripped her head off,” Adrian whispered.
Corey didn’t know what to think or say. He was troubled. “Why didn’t your dad tell you to wear a condom?”
“My dad says there are some things you have to find out for yourself.”
But he could be a great guy too. After they had bagged a deer, Adrian had wrestled the animal onto his back and posed with it draped victoriously over his shoulders. His father had taken a picture of him with the vanquished deer and Adrian had always kept it.
In mid-January, Corey learned that Adrian had gotten into MIT. In fact, the early-action letters had gone out six weeks ago. Corey couldn’t imagine why his friend hadn’t told him sooner. He was thrilled for him! He congratulated him. He had an idea: He wanted to introduce the two men he most admired to each other, both of whom were now linked to the same university. He invited Adrian to Quincy.
But tonight Adrian wanted to study. But Corey kept after him until he finally sighed and relented.
“I’m happy you’re coming. You’re not annoyed, are you?”
Adrian said he was used to tolerating his mother’s unreasonable requests.
They boarded the train at Harvard Square. Adrian persisted in talking about his studies, as if to prove that, though Corey could take him away from his books, he couldn’t interfere with his intellectual development.
As they traveled south, and especially after JFK/UMass, from which point on they moved along the open coast, Corey found himself overmastered by a grand sense of the voyage of their lives against the great map of the earth. He saw the earth from space, the arc of the coast, their movement along that arc from Cambridge down to Quincy, from port to port, as it were, and tried to express this idea to Adrian. “I can see us sailing down from Cambridge. We just as easily could be coming this same way in a boat. We’d be out there in the ocean.” He pointed out the window at the offshore blackness.
“Yes, we could easily be in a boat.” Adrian burst out laughing. And he began to lampoon Corey’s statement in the first person: “I’m in my boat! Don’t bother me!”
Corey tried to clarify what he’d meant, but made no headway with his friend.
At their destination, they debarked and walked out of the empty, white-lit station, into the night.
“This is where a lot of stuff goes down,” Corey said. “Usually there’s a cop.” Adrian turned his hat backwards.
“There’s nothing but bars down there. Come on.” They descended the hill.
“That’s my school.” It was a clean modern structure fronted by a dark lawn and a granite statue of an apple. They stopped and looked. Lights shone deep inside the building. A digital signboard scrolled the words Quincy High Pride.
Adrian could tell a lot of street fights happened here. He began to talk about mechanics. The key to delivering a maximally destructive blow was twisting around the axis of your trunk. Physicists represented the quantity of angular momentum using the variable omega. He stood in place describing how to calculate it. Corey wanted to get them moving again, but Adrian wouldn’t move until he finished talking.
As they were crossing the Southern Artery, Adrian caught sight of a Burger King and wanted to stop and feed his muscles. He laughed when Corey said it would slow them down. Corey waited while his friend consumed a double cheeseburger.
They continued down the shore, passing between the police station and the cemetery named after a Captain Wollaston, an old field gun on the rise amid the graves. They passed the turn for Corey’s job site, but he didn’t point it out because he didn’t want his friend to seize on any more distractions.
“It’s only a half mile to my house.”
But Adrian had seen the sign for Grumpy White’s and stopped. “Are you telling me that’s their name? That’s the funniest thing I ever heard!” He began whooping with laughter. He pretended to hold his stomach, as if to demonstrate he was in such pain he couldn’t touch it. “I’m going to be grumpy! That’s so like—” and he began one of his analyses.
“They’ve got an awesome sub,” Corey interjected. Adrian overruled him. He said the owners of Grumpy White’s were stuck in the anal stage of development.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like a little kid who has to shit himself to show he’s mad.”
But then, to Corey’s relief, they reached the bottom of the hill.
“Oh look! My father’s car is there; you’ll be able to meet him.” The Sable, a shadow, was parked behind his mother’s hatchback. He led his friend inside.
The inside of the house looked like a walnut—glossy dark brown. You couldn’t see anything in the shadow, which inundated the premises. It felt like a small cabin. A single lamp sat on the end table, and yellow light was escaping from the top of the lampshade leaving a glow on the wood veneer wall in the shape of a thumbprint. The room was empty. A book lay on the futon: Mathematical Physics. But the place was silent as if no one was there.
“Just a minute.” Corey left Adrian hulking in the center of the floor, crossed the room, tapped on his mother’s door. “Mom?” He opened her door just enough to slip in and closed it behind him. He found his mother in bed with her laptop. She was looking at images of slender flexible women doing yoga poses that made their bodies look like Sanskrit on a changing series of landscapes. He asked if she knew where Leonard was. Gloria didn’t know.
As Adrian stood in the living room, Leonard walked out of the darkened kitchen and said, “Hello.”
Corey heard voices commence speaking behind him. He said goodnight to his mother and closed her door carefully.
In the outer room, Leonard was kicked back on Gloria’s futon with his foot on her coffee table, in mid-discussion with Adrian.
“This is Adrian,” Corey interrupted. “He’s going to MIT.”
“He knows already,” Adrian said. “So what you’re saying is, to account for the cosmological constant, you take all this energy you have lying around and divide it up into all these different worlds. That takes care of the infinity issue…hmm. I see that. That could work.”
“Can you tell me what I missed?” Corey asked.
“Four years of high school physics,” Leonard said.
“Well, basically, we’re just saying, if you have this big thing that’s super huge that’s sitting in your equations, if you chop it up into enough pieces by using infinitely many equations, you can make it disappear.”
“I can follow that.”
“Have a look at the math and see what you make of it.” Leonard handed Adrian his book.
Corey tried to see the text over his friend’s shoulder. Adrian said the p’s and q’s had to be world states. Leonard said, “Very good.” Adrian began to explain how he had guessed effectively. It had to do with making leaps based on what he already knew. He explained how his brain worked. Leonard simply watched him through his amber glasses.
Adrian handed back the text. Corey intercepted it.
He’d never looked in one of his father’s books before. He saw nothing but mathematics—a blizzard of p’s, q’s, x’s, y’s, Greek letters, calculus, symbols from a strange arithmetic, including an upside-down delta operator. There was no English he could see. The rows of equations looked like the remains of sentences from which all the vowels had been vacuumed out.
Leonard had marked the page up thoroughly, just like Adrian had his Nietzsche. Unlike Adrian’s relentless block capitals, Leonard’s handwriting was irregular, jumping with internal disruptions. His words were different sizes, some big, fat, loopy, cursive; others small and tight and jagged and bent in one direction, as if written in a gale, then bent back the other way like grass; then screaming straight up and down, crushed together, and scribbled higher and higher like a spiking EKG. Corey couldn’t read a single one.
He began to grow self-conscious. He closed the book and tried to hand it to his father. But Leonard didn’t move to take it, and Corey set it on the table at his feet.
“You’re a wrestler,” Leonard said.
“How’d you know?” Adrian exclaimed.
Corey listened to them talk about wrestling and boxing, how it all came down to basic mechanics—to omega.
“I’m wondering if I could move us to the kitchen. I don’t want to wake her.”
“She’s not sleeping,” Leonard said.
Corey waited for the right moment to interrupt again. He told Adrian he wanted to show him something in his room.
“It looks like Corey’s getting anxious.”
“Yes, it looks like I have to go now. You’ve given me a lot to think about. I’m going to want to look into this type of mathematics.”
“Do that. You’ll have fun with it. I hope to see you at MIT.”
“That’d be great.”
Adrian followed Corey to his room.
“What’s this you have to show me?”
Corey took his block and tackle out of his closet.
“Look at the mechanical advantage of this!”
Adrian forced a smile. “Very good.”
In the aftermath of Adrian’s visit, Corey wanted to know what his father had thought of his friend. He announced that Adrian was getting the best grades in his high school AP Physics class. Leonard said that didn’t exactly qualify him for the Manhattan Project but acknowledged that he had seemed intelligent. Raising his eyes from his Springer-Verlag text, he added, “He’s eccentric. I think I smelled him.”
“He doesn’t like to wash.”
“He won’t do very well with the opposite sex if he doesn’t wash.”
“But he understood your book, didn’t he?”
“Yes, he seems remarkable,” Leonard said, returning his eyes to the page.
Later, in Cambridge, Corey told Adrian, “My father likes you.” Adrian’s dimples appeared. “That’s awesome.” He smiled and made a stilted, self-conscious cheering gesture with two tentatively clenched fists, like a robot saying hurray.