Most kids cannot tell you when the shifts changed winds shifted, braked and switched the light from night to day. When foods too strong for childhood taste buds barely registered above the nicohol coating. I remember exactly when I stopped being afraid of sleeping without the door cracked to hallway light.
It’s when I learned to take the test first and learn the lesson later.
1991
“I don’t know why it won’t start,” Mr. Goddard sighs in frustration, sitting in the boat, turning the ignition to no effect. His wife tells him not to worry, and his son, Ryan, walks towards him to ease the tension, the way family members do when the one they love is sitting on infarction number 5.
“The spark plugs,” I say. “The hoses are disconnected.” And as I say it the insulation catches fire, but we laugh at a problem so simple, and Ryan relaxes, his mom relaxes, and Mr. Goddard, God bless him, comes through the fog. They don’t know what that day meant to me, the only time in my life I had seen the world below, where fathers loved their children so tenderly that only pain could come from their passing. I tamp out the flames with my hat, hoping they will see I would suffer third degree burns just to bottle this moment, and in gratitude.
* * *
Massive, system-overwhelming levels of dopamine make way through artery and back through vein and finally through artery when the heart-shaped glands pump memories of the first time you held her shivering arms. Street value of eight million euros. Narcotic and lovely. Coming off that heroine high, scientists who’ve known love will tell you, leads to symptoms psycho and somatic equal parts, worse than the alcohol bends and shakes. I could still taste the carbonation in her mouth. I took the test first, passed; learned the lesson later. She still wound up leaving, even when I got all the facts straight.
It’s all in the telling.
* * *
The only man I ever knew who could reach infinity by division was Ryan’s dad. My math teacher.
Missouri heat stifled our mathematical abilities, and occasionally a wind would blow through the window, and we’d perk up enough to hear his questions and exhortations.
“It’s just an inch,” I replied, eyes closed, trying to savor the breeze.
“No, it’s infinity,” he said.
An inch into infinity. I was intrigued. How?
“How high can you count by squares?”
“2, 4, 16, 64, you know, to infinity.”
“What do you get if you divide an inch in half?” he asked, holding the straight edge of his pocket protractor at eye level.
“A half inch.”
“Divide it in half.”
“¼.”
“Again.”
“1/8…1/16…1/32…”
“You know,” he mimicked, “To infinity. And it's 256."
10th grade was when math and literature came to a meeting of minds.
* * *
And just before she leaves, she tightens her eyes, tenses. She sets the glass down, purses her lips. They naturally curve downward, in what might seem a frown on a doll, but with her face, it seems right. The people who can smile with their eyes alone, ignoring the workings of the mouth. That’s what I’ve always looked for. The ones who would eventually leave without a great showing of emotion. Dividing themselves in half, into themselves; withdrawing, to infinity.
* * *
It’s also when I stopped being afraid of the nothingness that I always feared death might bring. Closing my eyes forever would keep me up at nights, though open eyed life was no better. But I remembered once asking about Heaven, and she said, ‘It’s whatever you imagine.’
‘Forever?’
‘Forever.’
And after my math lesson years later the thought of infinity, of living through Heaven with no end in sight, to infinity, became ever more frightening to me than a definite good-bye. I live for good-byes. I live for conclusion and finality. I live for the end of the road.
To imagine that my destination held no horizon stifled the breath within me.
* * *
The year I graduated, Ryan and his brother were in a car accident. Mr. Goddard was not in school that day. His heart could not bear the infinity of possibility. Those boys of his he loved beyond the ability of his arteries to pump life, that they could bring him to his destination moved me.
It reminded me of when we got the boat started finally. They begged me to ski, but I always let go of the rope. I loved floating in the water, an infinity of drops below my feet, relishing the knowledge that they would come for me. I floated in that water unsinkable, as though suspended below a salt spring. And they came for this strange awkward boy.
He lived through the accident, but not long after. Ryan and his brother survived. A few months later, a freshman in college, I got the news that his heart gave out, this man who could reach infinity by division. He rose in the middle of the night. He walked down to the kitchen. There was a glass of water on the counter.
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