Universal Monsters Chapter XIX
“There was a time when music only existed while it was being played,” Space said. And then he paused like we were all supposed to get that this was way, way deep and maybe “ooh” or “gasp” or something. Brinkmire choked on some candy corn he found under a chair but we didn’t think that counted.
“It was not very long ago, really,” Space continued. “Wasn’t till Edison came up with the phonograph cylinder in 1877 that we had any reasonable way to record it and reproduce it. Before then it only existed while it was being played. People are like that. Not all people. Some people are just noise, but some of us are melodic. She was. For a time. For a spell she was magic. I’m a scientist but I’ve always believed in magic because I’ve always believed in girls. She was flaxen haired and she was the reason I learned the word “flaxen” and, probably, she was the reason the word was created. And she was skin. And she was light.
“She was never going to be Oppenheimer but she was going to contribute. She was going to be…she was going to…nothing much has happened in physics since String Theory and…she was making it elegant. She wasn’t trying to, I don’t think, but she was. Her notebook read like Byron. Her equations were cloudless climes and starry skies. Simple pleasures. Poetry in potions. She worked out a formula for a hyper-efficient nitrogen-based fuel on the back of a napkin once that I swear gave me a boner. I mean, I was thirteen at the time so the napkin alone could probably give me a boner but…she was something else.
“And I was her lab-partner and I was thirteen and she never treated me like a child, but we were never going to be…and I would have given up all the cleverness and purpose and fuck Mars and sat in a box for five years just waiting to be old enough if I could have. If she could stay the same. But time is linear probably just to fuck with me. Einstein said, ‘The reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.’ But I’ve thought about it and I’m pretty sure it’s just to fuck with my head.
“Platypi are like that. There’s no other reason I can think of for a duck-beaver that lays eggs. The fuck is up with that? I may be off topic again.
“I figured she’d write the book that brought high-level science to the masses. Not dumbed down just dressed up. You’d be amazed what even an average mind can grasp when it’s laid out like underwear by a pretty girl. Maybe, if we were very lucky, it would be the new Bible. Not the new Bible, the companion piece. One in every drawer beside the other. Telling us that God and science can co-exist just as long as you keep your eyes and your mind open and understand that love and chemistry hold hands on the beach and the age of the earth ends in ‘illion.’ And then she would write a book of poetry with math. She was Shakespeare in a lab coat and she would write the psalms and the sonnets.
“We would talk about her future and the things she would publish and the minds she would change. ‘The sky isn’t the limit,’ she would say to me. ‘Not anymore. There are no limits. I’ll take us anywhere and when we get there you’ll bend the fuckin’ thing.’
“You guys can probably fill in the really sad shit. The shit where I would just stare at her and draw love-fractals and the longing and all that unrequited whatever. That part isn’t important, really, but it was my first crush and I want to be honest about it because, I mean, fuck it. Why else would I tell the story?
“We graduated and I lost track of her. This was in the days before Facespaces and Mybooks and Frienderfritters and I lost track. And I got my Ph.D and I went to work for NASA like I was always going to and I grew up a little and actually kissed a girl at one point. And I went about trying to bend a piece of shit little red planet into something that just might not kill you if you’re very, very hard and very, very lucky. But that’s okay. Hard is good. Luck is good. That’s why America is great. We’re a country built on the backs of the hardest, most ambitious people the rest of the world had to offer. If you were satisfied with your life, if you were complacent, you stayed in Europe. If you were willing to take a fifty/fifty roll of the dice that you would die on the boat to a new country, and miss your stop by two-hundred miles and watch most of your family waste away or freeze to death in a mini ice-age or both all on the chance that you might be great, then you were American. Then you were music. You were fucking metal. You just didn’t have a name for it yet. Because Black Sabbath hadn’t taught us what we were yet.
“I’m actually not off on a tangent here, believe it or not. Not really
“I lost track of her but every three months or so I’d walk the aisles of bookstores and look for her name. I never saw it. I looked for years. It got easier when I got a driver’s licence.
“Then one day I found her at a shop called Demarcation. Not her book. Her. She was on Merrit Island, where I worked. She had been living in Jupiter, Florida for years. She didn’t recognize me at first. I was nineteen and the last time she saw me I was fourteen and I guess those are a pretty important five years for a lot of people. I needed a shave. But I told her who I was and she said, ‘Oh my god! Look at you!’ And I thought, I’ve been in a box for five years. A box of research and grease boards and rockets. I told her I was building off of her nitrogen fuel ideas for power sources on Mars, the one she worked out on the cocktail napkin and she said that made her very proud and she introduced me to her children Tyler and Barret.
“Tyler ignored me because he was ripping a copy of A Study In Scarlett to pieces and Barret said something that resembled hello and then licked me and told me I tasted like paint and spat on my pants. His spit was green and red at the same time and to this day I haven’t worked that one out.
“She told me, ‘Boys will be boys’ and I smiled and I nodded and in my head I calculated the torque I would need to snap their necks.”
She told me she met someone the summer after college and she was meant to do research at MIT for the fall semester but instead they got married and now she teaches physical science to high school freshmen at a public school in Jupiter. And in my head I calculated the torque I would need to snap my own neck. I worked out if it was possible to do. It isn’t. I mean, not without a fairly complex mechanical rig. In my head I built the rig out of things I saw around the bookstore.
I asked her if Tyler liked Sherlock, because he was my favorite growing up. She said he can’t read and I reminded her that he was almost five and what the fuck? She said that Jared didn’t want to rush the boys or pressure them to excel and I guessed that Jared was her husband and that he was European.
I asked her if I could buy her dinner and she said she was just in town antiquing and had to be home in time to make Jared’s dinner. And probably Tyler or Barret would need their diapers changed soon. And I reminded her that Tyler was nearly five and then I was sure Jared was European.
She told me he was a found-art sculptor and I said of course he was and had no idea what that meant and I went out to my car. It was the first time I can ever remember crying.
I’m the guy whose parents left him in the shell of a burned out house in the middle of winter when he was five and just took off and didn’t say goodbye or leave him food or electricity and in that car, outside that store, that was the first time I can ever remember crying.
I couldn’t get her out of my head. For days. For weeks. That was nothing new but this time it wasn’t sexy or fun or her laugh or her napkins. Now it was like she was an entire planet made of sadness and broken shit. And it was up to me to bend her.”
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