Lost, Almost Read online

  “Adam?” Katie said, part pride, part embarrassed whisper. She had never seen him during a weekday afternoon; he never left the lab until at least six, usually seven or eight, and she’d never known him to take so much as an hour off for a dentist’s appointment. The dentist opened on Saturday if Adam Brooks needed an appointment.

  “Katherine,” he said, with a nod in the direction of his granddaughter. It was clear that he hadn’t come to see her. “And you must be Mrs. Feeny.”

  “That’s right, Dr. Brooks. It’s an honor. Have you come to—would you like—” We marveled at our beloved, tough-skinned teacher, stammering like a schoolgirl. But Adam Brooks ignored her. He went to the blackboard and began to write. After a few lines of forceful scribbling, his stick of yellow chalk snapped in half. Mrs. Feeny went scurrying over to him to provide a new one, but he waved her away, having already picked up where he left off with the bigger of the two pieces. We sat, our mouths open, watching. Before our eyes, he was solving our math problem. None of us had thought even of the first step he was taking.

  “What’s that you just did?” Lorelai said after Adam had begun a third column of silent writing. Our ears burned in the silence. We would not have dared to interrupt. We didn’t know: was she oblivious to the power he wielded, or was she just that brave? Either way, we were glad she’d asked; he was moving fast, and none of us had followed it, not even Katie Brooks, his own flesh and blood. We told ourselves we’d remember to be nicer to Lorelai.

  “Fatou’s Lemma,” Adam said, without turning around, without even stopping the frantic movement of his chalk. “Ask your teacher. I haven’t the time.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lorelai said. “It’s just that there are some things in there that we haven’t had before, and—”

  “Be quiet, god damnit,” Adam snapped. He filled up three and a half of the four panels of blackboard at the front of the room. Our mouths hung open. Our eyes were fixed on the stream of symbols. He circled the answer at the end—the one that had eluded us—with a screech.

  “Voila,” he said. “Knock ‘em dead, kids.” He turned to leave.

  “Dr. Brooks,” Mrs. Feeny said, “We can’t thank you enough. Would you mind just walking us through your—” but Adam didn’t stop to answer her question. He didn’t even seem to hear her. He was already out the door, pulling it closed behind him.

  We looked at Katie to help us interpret what had just happened—she could’ve been our new queen—but she looked even more baffled than the rest of us. She hadn’t known it was coming.

  “Would it have killed him to write it down and make copies?” Mrs. Feeny said, under her breath, to no one in particular. Our eyes drifted back to the door he had left through. It usually stayed open during meetings. We were wondering, vaguely, whether we could chase him down and learn something more. We were wondering if he would ever come back.

  A sound came from inside the room. It was Lorelai. Her face was scrunched up so tightly we could barely see her eyes. She had been holding in her tears and finally she had let go and begun to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make him mad.”

  “Sweetheart, it wasn’t you,” Mrs. Feeny said. We considered this. If Lorelai hadn’t voiced our confusion, maybe he would’ve stayed.

  “It was,” she said. “Nobody else interrupted him. I shouldn’t even be here.” Our faces burned. Our shoes pinched. Our palms sweated.

  “Yes, you should,” we told her. “If anyone should be here, it’s you.”

  Adam Brooks, 1948

  There is an envelope in Adam’s mailbox. A business-size envelope of heavy cream paper bearing the Cal Tech crest. His name is written on the front.

  It bears only a few scribbled lines:

  Adam—

  Please see me before you leave for the holiday. I have something to discuss with you.

  Regards,

  Carl Anderson

  Adam exhales slowly. Professor Anderson is his assigned advisor in the physics department, and taught one of the two physics classes Adam took in his first term. He checks his watch, squinting and tipping its face in the darkness. The professor will already have gone home, and Adam will have to wait until tomorrow.

  His mind is racing through possibilities, good and bad. He needs to focus all his attention on something else. The term has ended—there are no assignments—but he goes to the library just the same. He finds the shelf with spare copies of all the textbooks in current use; there they all are, without the usual gaps of borrowed copies. He pulls the text for the electrodynamics class he is hoping to take in the spring and starts with the table of contents. By the time the librarian comes into the reading room to shoo him out, he is well into Chapter Two, Electrostatics.

  He sleeps poorly, and is out of bed early. He doesn’t want breakfast, but he doesn’t want to be lurking outside the door when Professor Anderson arrives. He gets himself two pieces of toast and a cup of coffee, though he has never drank coffee. He associates the smell with his mother, who had kissed him goodbye before school each morning with the smell of coffee on her breath, who writes him letters hoping to persuade him to transfer closer to home. He takes a small, tentative sip. It is hot and bitter, and part of him wants to spit it out, but the strong taste gives him something to focus on besides his own apprehension. He drinks the whole cup, one small sip after the other, then clears his dishes and walks to Professor Anderson’s office. The door is open. He raps on the frame.

  Anderson is a middle-aged man with heavy eyebrows and thinning hair. His office is cold, and Adam sees that the window is cracked open, letting in the chilled early morning air. He motions Adam in. “Now, Mr. Brooks, you’re a bit younger than most of your classmates, correct?”

  “Yes,” Adam says. “I just turned seventeen last week.”

  “Well, happy belated birthday. Now, I ask because I’m sensing something in you that I see from time to time in students.” Adam is barely breathing. His hopes are climbing. “You did quite well in your physics classes and I can see that you care very much about math and science.”

  “I do,” Adam says. “Ever since I was a little kid.”

  “My concern is in how you feel about your other classes. Other areas of study in general.”

  Adam’s heart pounds wildly now, that word, concern, ringing in his ears.

  “Your scores were acceptable,” Anderson says. “More than sufficient to pass. In both your German class and in Western Thought. But it’s obvious to me, and to your other professors, that you considered them to be a waste of your time.”

  “Well,” Adam says. “I came here to study physics.”

  “Yes,” Anderson says, a terrible patience in his voice. “So did I, a number of years ago, when I was a freshman just like you. But there is more to life, and more to being an educated man.”

  “I came here to study physics,” Adam says again. “That’s all I want to do. I don’t want to be a philosopher, or a, a…a poet.” He spits the word out with disgust. He thinks of the gangly boy in his high school class who was always getting into trouble with the principal for letting his hair grow too long, carrying a book around and bumping into things because he couldn’t stop reading long enough to walk. He had come here to get away from such foolishness.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Anderson says. “I’m just going to give you one assignment. You can do it over the vacation. And you must make a good-faith effort. Give it everything you’ve got, which I think everyone here agrees is quite a lot. You haven’t any work in math or physics to do over the next month in any event, so it can’t interfere. And then you can continue as you were, doing the bare minimum, if you still feel that that is what you really want, and you will get your degree in physics, and go off into the world and do as you wish. But I suspect you will enjoy it, and that it will be helpful to you, and I would like to continue these meetings and discuss things with you beyond science.”

  Adam sits in silence, betrayed. He’d thought he h
ad finally reached a place where the most highly valued quality was one he possessed in spades, where extreme devotion to his precise area of interest was rewarded instead of ridiculed. And it had been; his scores were high, his classmates impressed. Boys in his house often knocked on his door to run things by him before handing them in or taking them up with a professor. Older boys had conversations he could follow, and into which he sometimes joined, to which he could actually contribute. And who was Professor Anderson to tell him that wasn’t the way? He was no Einstein. No Oppenheimer.

  “I don’t think that will be necessary,” Adam finally says. “If I did well in my major classes and passed the others, I’ll just enroll in the next level next term.”

  “You need my signature,” Anderson says. “On your enrollment form.”

  “I need instruction,” Adam says. “In physics. In math.” His voice rises. He feels the urge to stand. It doesn’t matter that Anderson is his teacher, many years his senior. If the man is wrong, well then, he is wrong.

  “Instruction you will get,” Anderson says, mildly. “You needn’t worry about that.” He reaches to a shelf behind him and slips out a volume with a worn spine, its lettering too faded to read from across the desk. “I am only asking this of you because I believe you have great potential,” he continues. “And I believe that this very brief detour may provide you with some context and methods of thinking that will prove valuable to you in your future work.”

  “What’s the book?”

  Anderson passes it across the desk.

  Adam opens the cover to read the text printed on the title page. The Collected Stories of Anton Chekhov, Volume II.

  “Your assignment is to read this volume and choose the story that is most applicable to your life. Whatever that means to you. Whether there’s some moment or insight in one of them that feels familiar in your life, or just moves you for some reason, or if you detect some idea in Chekhov’s thinking or observations, some quality in his values that you share. And then you must write a short essay explaining your choice. But in doing so, you must identify things you detect in the stories as a group, so you are able to explain why the one you choose stands out. If you just read one here and there, it will be apparent.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “I suppose you were bound to ask that.” This comment makes Adam even angrier. “It is possible that the chair might assign you a new advisor, though I suspect that most of my colleagues would honor my request that you complete this assignment before registration. Or you could come back and try again another term, when you are a little older. I suppose you could attempt to forge my signature. Or you could try someplace else. You really do seem quite brilliant, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if MIT would have you. But I do hope you’ll just give this a try. There is room in your mind for more than you think. I suspect that this sort of exercise might even expand that room.” Adam shakes his head and stands.

  “All right, then,” he says. He makes no attempt to conceal his hostility. “I’ll just have to see about this.” He is angry with himself for lacking a better response. He is angry with Anderson for saddling him with this requirement.

  “Take the book,” says Anderson. He leans back in his chair. Its hinges creak. “You don’t have to decide this moment, though the harder you resist, the more I am convinced that this will be time well spent for you. Take it with you, and when you return, you can bring it back, read or unread, and if you don’t return, you can send it, because it’s a favorite of mine and I would hate to lose it.”

  Adam turns the book over in his hand and takes a deep breath. He feels the way he sometimes does when he awakes in the middle of a dream and can’t remember what was real and what was invented. He needs to say something further, to bring this meeting to a close, but his mind is blank.

  “Why Volume II?” he finally asks.

  “Perhaps I will let you decide that,” Anderson says. “When you are finished with this one, I will loan you Volume I to read all the rest, and tell me whether you agree that this was the better place to start.”

  “I never said I—”

  “Oh, hush,” Anderson interrupts. “Run along, you must have some beer to drink or whatever it is you do when classes are out. Come see me next month.” Adam opens his mouth to speak again, to protest this infantalization, or at least to correct him and explain that he isn’t about to go off drinking in the middle of the day, but Anderson appears to have engrossed himself in a pile of papers on his desk. Adam takes the book.

  He doesn’t tell anybody about his meeting with Anderson, though there are any number of the guys in his house, all of them older and several further along in their studies, who would have listened and might have had some advice. For all he knows, he isn’t the only freshman to have gotten this lecture. Maybe Fitzwilliam, on the second floor, got this same talking to two years ago. Or perhaps Pruitt, who is also from Iowa and has taken Adam to parties with him. But he doesn’t want them to know.

  As the day wears on and the conversation plays itself back over and over in his mind, he becomes more and more sure that he doesn’t wish to return on these terms. Anyway, the faculty is diminished from what it was a few years earlier, and most of the men his high school physics teacher had mentioned as great teachers are no longer here. He could go back home and send in applications to other places. He could go to Cornell, or, as Anderson had suggested, MIT. He could go somewhere where he will be more appreciated.

  The bus ride will take two days, and he’s only been on the bus about three hours when boredom begins to nibble. He has flipped through the day’s newspaper already, and everyone around him seems to be reading or sleeping. He tries to sleep and can’t, the noise of the bus and the springs of the seat keeping him awake. He opens his satchel. There is a sandwich swiped from the house kitchen, his train ticket, the scarf he’d been wearing when he’d arrived on campus, which had remained balled up under his bed the entire four months he was there. And there is Anderson’s book. He takes it out and turns it over and over in his hands. It has a musty smell, like the boxes of sweaters his mother hauls out of the attic every September.

  He scans the table of contents. All the stories have names that seem incredibly silly to him, single words or short phrases, ordinary words that anyone could have written. He slams the book shut again, angry with Anderson all over again for insulting his intelligence. What sort of person would read a story titled “Sleepy,” or “Boys,” “Art” or “Love?” The stories, he realizes, must be quite short; the contents lists about a hundred titles, perhaps more, and the book isn’t thick. Stories for children. Well isn’t this grand, he thinks. Just grand.

  He looks out the window but sees only dusty farmland speeding by. He doesn’t want to read Professor Anderson’s book, but he so hates to waste perfectly good time, and he hasn’t brought anything else to read, having been required to return everything to the library at the end of the term, and having run out of pocket money nearly three weeks ago. He opens the cover again and slides his finger down the list of stories. He stops at random, turns to the appropriate page, and begins to read.

  Rescue

  The first time I asked my grandfather for help, I was eleven.

  I don’t know why I did it. An impulse just came over me during recess, while the girls with their barrettes were off behind the swings in a huddle, leaving me to wander the yard on my own. He was standing alone, the skinniest boy in my class; a sunbeam was on him, and the wind was blowing hard, and I just thought, I bet I could do it. And then, I did. The stone arced perfectly, blown slightly off center by the steady wind, the force of gravity interacting with the upward and outward force I had applied exactly as I had known they would, making a perfect parabola, hitting right where I’d aimed, the spot at the base of his neck where it connected to his skull, where the curl of hair, that little rat tail, began.

  At first he seemed all right. Surprised, he put his hand to the spot, then turned to see me. And then, he crum
pled slowly, his ankles and knees collapsing as he fell to the blacktop in the middle of the four-square court that had been drawn there the day before with pink and yellow chalk.

  It was this second hit—his head on the blacktop—that actually injured him. That’s what they determined later, at the hospital, and eventually reported to me, after all the decisions had been made. The rock had barely left a bump, and no one was sure why it had even caused him to fall. But it had, and I had thrown it, and there was no getting around either of those facts.

  If I had been a boy, they probably would have branded me a bully, a bad seed. I’d have been suspended, or perhaps even expelled, the boy’s unexpected fragility my bad luck. But when the teachers came running and asked what had happened, and all the fingers pointed at me, I was met with puzzlement.

  “Why did you do that, sweetheart?” they asked. “Did he do something to you? Was there something else you were aiming for? Didn’t you see him?” I had no answer; I just shook my head.

  “I don’t know,” I said, again and again, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” I was sorry he was hurt. In that moment I had meant to hit him, I was sure of that, but I had not meant for it to hurt, and I certainly had not intended any sort of permanent damage. I saw it again and again in my mind, the knees, the ankles. I heard the thump. I closed my eyes and the playground was still there; I was still there.

  They took me to the principal’s office. One of the teachers had told him what happened, and what I had said about it so far (I don’t know, I don’t know), and he took me straight upstairs to the guidance counselor, Mrs. Hayes. He spoke to her in a whisper for a moment, then left us alone. He must have called my parents as soon as he got back downstairs, because I’d barely been there, failing to answer her questions, for fifteen minutes when they arrived together, in their work clothes, badges pinned to their pockets. They both looked at me, their mouths in little lines. I had thought my mother might come in beside me, lean down and give me a hug, or lay a hand on my shoulder, whisper something, it’s all right, love, but she stayed beside my father, stiff as a stranger.