Lost, Almost Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise for Lost, Almost

  Half-Title Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Information

  Epigraph

  Adam Brooks, 1945

  Solution

  Adam Brooks, 1948

  Rescue

  Adam Brooks, 1953

  Retreat

  Adam Brooks, 1957

  Ceiling

  Angeline Brooks, 1958

  Velocity

  Adam Brooks, 1961

  Defense

  Adam Brooks, 1995

  Crawlspace

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for Lost, Almost

  “Through spare and precise language, Knight’s debut novel follows three generations of the Brooks family as they are both nurtured and impeded by their physicist patriarch…Knight avoids easy conclusions and balances this intergenerational story with levity, honesty, and just the right measure of heartbreak.” —Publishers Weekly

  “At its best, this novel demonstrates the multifaceted way in which people occupy different roles in the course of the same life: to some members of his family, Adam is a revered figure, capable of solving a host of problems with the resources at his disposal; to others, he can be cold, holding the people around him to impossibly high standards… The way the book moves forward and backward in time is generally illuminating rather than disorienting; by the end, the overall effect is a deeper understanding of this family’s strengths and flaws and the way Adam has shaped and been shaped by them…A memorable exploration of the consequences of history on both a personal and an intellectual level.”—Kirkus Reviews

  “Lost, Almost takes us into a magnetic world, one where characters orbit not just Los Alamos and the sciences, but also the appealingly hard-nosed physicist Adam Brooks. His son, his grandchildren, and his colleagues all live within his gravitational pull. These characters’ passion for their work becomes the reader’s, and Amy P. Knight paints her brilliant subjects with confidence, empathy, and a deep understanding of psychology. Knight has managed to build a small solar system in these pages, one I was bereft to leave. Hers is a bold, enthralling, and often hilarious new voice.”

  —Rebecca Makkai, author of Music for Wartime

  “In her incendiary debut novel, Amy P. Knight gives us a glimpse into the lives of those who ‘need to be right more than anything, more than air, more than love,’ and of those who would rather win than be right. No mere cautionary tale, this story is a haunting meditation on the hazards of genius and the dangers of any society ‘long on intellect [and] short on empathy.’ Except that empathy, dear reader, is all you’ll have for these characters, even for Adam Brooks, the book’s hero. I say hero, but Brooks is also a villain, a father, a tyrant, a child. Brooks, and all the rest, resist comfortable categorization. No, this book is too complicated, and too good, for that. Lost, Almost is a staggering achievement.”

  —David James Poissant, author of The Heaven of Animals

  “Like a mad scientist in the lab of human insight, Amy P. Knight has created a beautiful novel of nuclear proportion. Hers is an exploration of creation and destruction, passion and compulsion, brilliance and cruelty. If nothing else, the absorbing experiment that is Lost, Almost teaches us once again that the most important element in science was then, is now, and ever shall be, love and belonging to family and the human race. It is a perfect reminder for this era of hapless leadership.”

  —MB Caschetta, author of Miracle Girls

  Lost, Almost

  a novel

  Lost, Almost

  Amy P. Knight

  Engine Books

  Indianapolis

  Engine Books

  PO Box 44167

  Indianapolis, IN 46244

  enginebooks.org

  Copyright © 2017 by Amy P. Knight

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are

  either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  Also available in hardcover and eBook formats from Engine Books.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN: 978-1-938126-84-0

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017957909

  “How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost,

  Defac’t, deflow’r’d, and now to Death devote?”

  —John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IX

  Adam Brooks, 1945

  It is pouring rain. A good solid downpour means a day off from his summer job painting houses: sleeping in, lingering over breakfast, sharing a quiet morning with his mother, who knits and listens to the radio as he flips through magazines or works a bit at a translation, blowing pink eraser flakes onto the table, where they sometimes land in the butter dish.

  He is considering his next move—it might be a good day for the library—when his mother grabs him firmly by the wrist. She is looking in the direction of the radio, the quiet murmuring of news.

  “The President,” she says. Adam wipes a crumb from the corner of his lip, irritated. He skims headlines but he doesn’t like to follow the war news. None of it makes any sense to him. He picks up the last corner of toast and is about to pop it in his mouth, but his mother stops his hand in midair. “Turn it up,” she says. Adam tilts his chair up onto two legs to reach the knob.

  The bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT, more than two thousand times the blast power of the British “grand slam,” the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.

  Now Adam is listening. He sets the toast back down. He knows what this is, even before the President can get the words out. He has never had this thought before, not in all his endless hours of study, but there could only be one way to get that much power into a single bomb.

  It is an atomic bomb, a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.

  The talking goes on for several more minutes, but already Adam is lost. Without realizing it, he has picked up a pencil and begun to sketch out an equation on the back of yesterday’s evening paper, right under the weather report. He wants to run to his room, to start rooting through the stack of papers he’s stolen, carefully, one at a time, slicing them from the bound volumes in the university library with a razor blade, to see if he can find the roots of this, begin to trace the thread. A lot of them are in German, especially the older ones, and Adam can’t read the text, but he doesn’t need to. The equations are the same. He knows there have to be more, many more of Einstein’s papers that he has not yet managed to steal, perhaps even the ones he will need to really understand, but he has the nub of it. They are right there in the house, up one flight of stairs. His mother is holding his wrist again. She has more strength in her small hand than seems possible.

  He cannot sit still. His body is made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are bursting with the energy of twenty thousand tons of TNT. His brain is full of figures that can describe but never capture the immense power of the universe to create and to destroy, the rules that define its order, improbable but irrefutable. In the days that follow he will read news articles about three secret cities, in Washington, Tennessee, and New Mexico. He will see the photographs and learn the names of the physicists, some familiar, some not. But now, it is all he
can do to keep his body from busting open.

  The broadcast ends. He looks up to see that his mother is silently crying, her free hand shaking in the air.

  The phone rings. A neighbor asks if they’ve heard the news, if they’ll come over to drink champagne. The war is as good as over. Adam’s mother declines, then phones her husband at the office. He is not in.

  “Do you think there were people there?” she says, turning back to Adam, her lower lip trembling. “Where did they drop it? All those poor people. Their poor families.” His mother had been a teenager in England during the last war, and Adam has been told the stories, but they do not come back to him now.

  “Mama,” he says, “They’ve done it. They’ve split the atom.”

  Years later, she would tell him that she had taken “atom” for his own name, Adam, that she thought he had been split in his mind, painfully divided in his heart between sharing her sorrow and joining the celebrations, and yes, these things are swirling around him, a nation split between victory and shame, caricatures of horn-blowing and hand-wringing, noise and high emotion and tears of every kind, but Adam is not a part of any of this. It riots around him as though he is a big steel bolt holding the spinning carousel to the earth.

  Solution

  After dominating the southwest in the high school Math Team competition for three straight years, we had finally found the unsolvable math problem. At first, separately, we each thought it was a fluke. We were missing something. There was an obvious answer right in front of our noses, and we’d be laughed at by the others for missing it. But slowly, a whisper developed: I’m stuck. I thought I had it but it’s a dead end. It’s a trick question.

  Not one of us could crack it. Not Joe Gemelli, whose father had been the head of the math department at Berkeley. Not Peter Gibbon, whose dad’s job was so secret that even we, masters of gossip, had no idea which department he worked in. Not even Mrs. Feeny, our favorite math teacher, who volunteered her Tuesday and Thursday afternoons to coach our team. She’d pulled out the answer key after we initially hit the wall, and we heard her cursing under her breath as she worked. This was part of why we liked her. We also liked her because she managed to explain things to us without making us feel stupid, and because she drank Dr. Pepper out of the can when the rest of the teachers drank stale black coffee.

  We slaved over the problem for all of the Thursday meeting, all of the Tuesday meeting, and all of the next Thursday, trying to get to the answer in the book. We worked alone, or in pairs, or, for a while, all as one. Once, Jennifer Goldfarb thought she had it, but she was off by two decimal places, and no matter how carefully we looked, we couldn’t find where she’d gone wrong. Joe suggested that the answer key was wrong, but we rejected this idea—it was the easy way out. Laziness. Casting the blame for our difficulty elsewhere.

  We didn’t want to show it to our parents—we had our pride—but after four days, an unsolved math problem was more painful than asking for help, so we took copies home with us, stuffed into backpacks or folded into perfect, neat squares in our pockets. We didn’t bring the looseleaf notebooks we’d filled (we’d filled entire notebooks in those hours of trying), preferring to make it look casual. Some of us tried to pass it off as a challenge: we solved this. Can you? Jon Finke just left it lying around, knowing his father wouldn’t be able to resist. Jennifer Goldfarb took her nearly-completed proof to her physicist-father and asked him point-blank to spot her error. Katie Brooks’s mother, the chemist, took one look and pronounced it a job for her grandfather instead. “You can bring it on Sunday,” she said. “Let him take a swing at it.”

  We found each other in school on Friday, and no one had yet cracked it, though our parents were busy at the lab, and to be fair, most of them probably hadn’t given it much attention. But we were growing excited at the prospect of a new discovery. If none of us could solve it after days of trying, there had to be something there, some breakthrough to be made. “My dad took it to work with him,” Peter Gibbon whispered into several people’s ears during the day. We were supposed to understand this to mean that it was being taken very seriously. Perhaps the solution, when it finally arrived, would be the key to some invention that would save us all. Some of us believed it, and some of us just thought that Peter Gibbon was trying to get us to like him, because a lot of us felt sort of awkward around him. His clothes were very expensive, and his hair always looked wet, when the rest of us were lucky if our socks matched.

  Saturday, we forgot about the math problem. We were just kids, after all, most of us between fourteen and seventeen. We had other plans: we rode bikes, or wrote poems, or hitched into Santa Fe to shop for tapes and Tshirts and candy. Joe Gemelli locked himself in his room with some magazines borrowed from his father’s dresser drawer. Ryan Scarselli helped his mother bake and decorate a cake for his aunt’s forty-seventh birthday.

  There was one exception. Lorelai Halbroker had not put the problem aside. She’d worked on it Friday night until she couldn’t keep her eyes open, then set her clock radio for 5:30 to get the maximum Saturday time in. When her mother rose at eight to make pancakes, she had already worked her way into three of the same dead ends we’d already explored. Poor Lorelai. She was always doing things like this, but it never got her anywhere the rest of us hadn’t gotten already. Still, she was a nice girl. We liked to have her around. If we’d been honest with ourselves (though few of us were, at that age, or later), we might have said that she reminded us how exceptional we were, and that that felt good.

  Katie Brooks spent Sunday working on her grandfather’s old car, which he was teaching her to repair. It wasn’t until Sunday evening, when the formal family dinner was almost at a close, that she remembered the folded piece of paper she’d meant to bring to him. She was nervous; though we would’ve all liked to believe that it was someone in our house who would crack it, Katie had the most legitimate claim. She had two parents and a grandfather who had serious, code-word jobs in the lab. Her family had lived here longer than any of the rest of ours.

  After dinner, while Katie’s little brother did the dishes, Katie ran for her backpack to retrieve the folded paper. She brought it to Adam, along with a cup of black coffee and a silver spoon, arranged on the saucer just the way he liked it. “I’ve got a math problem,” she said.

  “For school?” He took the coffee.

  “Math Team,” she said. “None of us can get it. Not even Mrs. Feeny. It’s been a couple of days now.” Oh, how we would’ve liked to be in that room when she told him that! We knew about Adam Brooks. Some of our parents had been fired by him, or at least severely reprimanded. We’d seen him around, with his wild white hair and his faded clothes. We’d seen his name in the local paper, or heard him snapping at the mailman or the janitor or anyone else who showed a hint of laziness. We wanted to get close, but we also wanted to stay out of the way.

  “Give it here.” He took the paper and slipped his reading glasses from his pocket onto his nose. Four minutes passed, and he neither moved nor spoke. The rest of our families, upon receiving such a challenge, immediately took pencils to it. They began sketching out possible solutions, choices for the route by which they might penetrate the puzzle. Mostly, they were retracing our own failed steps. But Adam just stared. Katie grew uncomfortable. Was he solving it in his mind, and any minute now, he would casually spit out the answer as though it were the easiest thing in the world? She hoped so, and hoped not at the same time. The rest of us, if we had been there, would have hoped only for the easy answer; by now we just wanted the problem solved, the solution explained, and if it was the genius of the town who explained it to us, all the better. But Katie, no matter how unlikely she knew it to be, wanted to work on it with him, making perhaps one small contribution to every four or five of his. She wanted the battle to play out in her presence, aloud. The silence grew. Perhaps he was growing frustrated. Perhaps our intractable problem had opened in him a pit of despair.

  Finally, he spoke. “It’s late an
d I’ve got data to review. Maybe another time.” He pocketed the folded sheet of paper and went to his study. If we’d been there, we would’ve urged Katie to object. We would’ve demanded more information: Do you think you can do it? Do you have any ideas? Were we on the right track? But Katie had grown up around Adam Brooks. She knew not to push him.

  That was it, we all agreed. It was time to give up. We had no more resources at our disposal. Word circulated through the hallways, into the different classrooms, some of us in English class, some in science and history and French, in different grades. Maybe there had been some mistake, a misprint, but we didn’t think so. We’d been bested. We’d move on to other problems. We’d still win the state championship, and have a crack at nationals. For now, we had pop quizzes and research projects and college applications to worry about.

  When we arrived in Mrs. Feeny’s classroom for our Tuesday Math Team meeting, it was as though we had all witnessed some terrible act of violence, and didn’t know how to talk to each other anymore as the people we had been. Joe Gemelli and Peter Gibbon seemed to have had some sort of fight, and were on opposite sides of the room, refusing to look at each other. Katie Brooks and Jennifer Goldfarb were side by side, reviewing their scores from previous exams, digging up the extremely rare problems they’d missed. Jon Finke had his dirty sneakers up on the desk and was reading a comic book. Ryan Scarselli was doing biology homework. Mrs. Feeny stayed at her desk, her head down, her face flushed. She was supposed to be our leader, and she had no answers for us. It was from her that we’d gotten the fateful problem to begin with. She’d even considered calling off the meeting that day; none of us felt like getting back to work on a new set of problems, even with the championship coming up next month. But home would be no better. How could it be that two short weeks ago, we had been an invincible problem-solving machine?

  When he appeared in the doorway, our hearts sped up. Adam Brooks. Had he really come to sit beside us at our small wooden desks and explain away that complexity that had stumped us? It would be the career day we’d never had, because of course, we had no career day in Los Alamos. Nearly everybody’s parents worked in the lab, in one capacity or another, and many were not at liberty to tell a classroom full of squirming kids what they did all day.