Page 37 - WTP Vol. XIII #1

“Santa Claus doesn’t fix furnaces,” I said, but my son, so close to Christmas, didn’t smile.
Rather than call on a Sunday night, I shut the whole thing off. Better to be cold than have the thing ex- plode, I reasoned, and it was only forty degrees outside, the house insulated enough to hold some of the heat until morning. “When do you think it stuck?” my wife asked.
It was our first winter in a new house, but I said, “Last night” at once, “maybe only this morning,” and though neither of us had proof, my wife agreed, be- cause even two days of such relentless heat seemed impossible without an explosion. The pressure needle was swiveled far into the red zone of danger. If our house were an airplane, a warning system would have screamed “pull up.” For half an hour,
we watched the needle fall back and waited for the house to adjust. The newspapers, Thursday through Sunday, were bunched by the mail slot, and a few minutes later, when my wife reached Saturday’s pa- per, she read aloud the first four sentences of a story about a five-year-old boy electrocuted in his bathtub, stopping when our son stepped into the room. He looked at the picture and wanted to know what had happened. “Something went wrong with his electric- ity,” my wife offered.
“Our electric is wrong, too,” our son said.
“Yes, it is, but in a different way,” my wife answered. “I don’t want a bath.”
I read for myself the details of how that boy had died because a lamp fell into the water while his parents watched television downstairs. “There were lights on in the bathroom,” the mother remarked to the re- porter, “so maybe it was for heat.” Upstairs, when our son called us to his bed, the house was still a sauna. “It’s going to stay hot like this, isn’t it?” he said. “I’m
all sweaty. I’m just as wet as when I take a bath.”
“That’s not the same,” I said, and he settled for an open window.
Finished with kindergarten by noon the following day, our son came home from a morning that includ- ed an hour of school-sponsored counseling. The dead boy’s desk, he advised us for the first time, was right in front of his. “Were you ever so cold you thought you were freezing?” he asked, interrupting the news I had the habit of watching during lunch.
“The blizzard of `77,” I said at once. “Near Buffalo, where we lived when you were born. I was teaching high school then, and they dismissed school early, but some students couldn’t get home. Teachers had a choice of leaving or staying overnight in the gym with 400 kids. I picked walking home.”
“How far?”
“A mile. Half way there the road turned west, and the wind was so strong I lost track of where I was, zig- zagging in a way that made the trip almost twice as far. Finally, I turned and walked backwards in the middle of the street because I didn’t think anybody was still driving a car. All I did was shove my heels toward home and tell myself to keep moving.”
“You were born three months later,” my wife said.
“If you had frozen, I would never have seen you.” “We should talk about something else,” my wife said.
Dark Matter
Long ago, I sat beside a friend whose parents were both dead before he turned twenty-five. We were under an IMAX dome, Hubble photographs demon- strating the enormity of dust. I wondered whether what we were seeing might strain the limits of my friend’s faith. The heavens became a billion suns. A voice recited in light-year language, the vocabulary for endlessness. My friend threw his head back to absorb the Pillars of Creation, those famous nebu- lae, and I listened, beside him, to the theory of dark matter, eighty per cent of the universe ascribed to the utterly transparent darkness of the unobservable, hearing him murmur the brief acquiescence of amen, the lenses of our eyes enhanced to the scope of gods who, knowing the unaccounted for, turn their flimsy backs to the expanding dust.
(continued on next page)
30