Page 28 - WTP Vol. X #7

Summer John (continued from preceding page)
debate, the family drove up to Troy in the huge Buick station wagon. I sat in the smaller rear seat with Kenny, feeling carsick facing backwards at the past rather than ahead to the future. I attempted and failed to keep Kenny busy for a while playing with string; a three-year-old’s attention span and finger control were equally unreliable. I did a few of the eight turns Old John had taught me: Soldier’s bed; Candles; Manger; Diamonds; Cat’s eye; Fish
in a Dish; Clock; and Cat’s Cradle. My uncle was at the wheel, and my aunt sat beside him. With my
resistance to decoherence.
My father’s license was suspended during my college freshman year, but thereafter he practiced medicine until he died the year I was pregnant with my firstborn. To his wake, one of his immigrant patients who had paid in barter since the 50’s, brought jugs of homemade wine and frozen packages of deer he’d hunted. A Guinness World Record for stone skipping was set in 1992, thirty- eight bounces, filmed on the Blanco River in Texas, bested once in 2007 and twice in 2014. Galileo and Newton had gotten the laws of motion moving, but it was a French physicist who developed a formula for estimating how many times a stone would skip based on spin and speed. The key to a good skip, Lyderic Bocquet said in 2004, lay in spinning the stone. Engineers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory proposed a HyperSoar airplane, which would skip along Earth’s upper atmosphere at five to twelve times the speed of sound.
In 2010, Boeing was reported designing an experi- mental military weapon that could fly twenty-five miles above Earth, then drift up into space and down again. When it hit the denser air of the upper atmosphere, it would bounce back up like a stone hitting water. Eighteen skips would be enough to get HyperSoar from Chicago to Rome in seventy- two minutes. As of June, 2015, the US military was reportedly developing such a new hypersonic ve- hicle that could take flight by 2023, building upon research from a 2013 test flight of the experimen- tal X-51A Waverider.*
What’s it to be, then, sorrow over the depths to which a stone may sink or celebration of its defi- ance of gravity? Kathy surprised me by calling at the very end of that August at the beginning of the '60s. She put her phone up to her radio and told me to listen to the song that had just come on, the one we’d sung to each other all summer. Then with the radio in the background, Kathy sang and once again together we imitated Brenda Lee’s melodi- ous growling of Sweet Nothings.
*https://www.livescience.com/51388-hypersonic-jet-could-fly-mach-5.html
Bassen’s grandmother, a telegrapher on Wall Street a century ago, taught her to read and tapped messages to her in Morse Code. Bassen has published three books, Summer of the Long Knives (Typhoon Media-Signal 8 Press), Lives of Crime & Other Stories (Texture Press), Showfolk & Stories (Inkception Books), and one poetry collection, What Suits a Nudist? (Clare Songbirds Pub- lishing House). She is a fiction editor at Craft Literary. An earlier version of “Summer John” appeared in of The Wild World, as “Resistance to Decoherence.”
“T
he convict’s kiss
shocked, flattered, repulsed, and disappointed
her. Those were some dot to dots to try to connect.”
maternal grandmother, my mother was crammed between my father and brother in the middle. The radio was on in the front of the car, and my uncle was explaining about “payoffs” when my brother snapped, “You’re stupid.”
There was some swerving and yelling, and Kenny didn’t know whether to cry. My brother’s cramped position—also as firstborn and family genius—he eventually won a Nobel—kept any hand from being raised to smack him.
In November, Kennedy won the election. Three years later, after skipping my senior year of high school, I felt the same dizziness again. I was a freshman at a college where tests were adminis- tered on a non-proctoring honor system, so it was
a shock when our French professor entered, crying, “Ah, mademoiselles, on a assassine Le President!”
Even before we’d left New Hampshire, I knew my aunt had been wrong about swimming spread-
ing the rash. In time, I ripened and mastered Cat’s Cradle, studied geometric topology, and won a minor award in 2007 for a paper chronicling the 1867 faulty atomic theory known as the Tait con- jectures that quantum theory eclipsed for a while. By the end of the 20th century, knot theory had reemerged. Useful regarding DNA and polymers
in biology and chemistry, its related braid theory figured in the development of quantum computers’
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