The Boys of My Youth (12 page)

The plan is that I’m supposed to separate one from the herd and get it in a corner. Caroline will take it from there. Unfortunately,
my nerves are shot, and when I’m in the room with her and the squirrels are running around all I can do is scream. I’m not
even afraid of them, but my screaming button is stuck on and the only way to turn it off is to leave the room.

“How are you doing?” I ask from the other side of the door. All I can hear is Caroline crashing around and swearing. Suddenly
there is a high-pitched screech that doesn’t end. The door opens and Caroline falls out into the hall, with a gray squirrel
stuck to her glove. Brief pandemonium and then she clatters down the stairs and out the front door and returns looking triumphant.

The collie appears at the foot of the stairs with her head cocked and her ears up. She looks like a puppy for an instant,
and then her feet start to slide. I run down and catch her and carry her upstairs so she can watch the show. They careen around
the room, tearing the ancient wallpaper off the walls. The last one is a baby, so we keep it for a few minutes, looking at
its little feet and its little tail. We show it to the collie, who stands up immediately and tries to get it.

Caroline patches the hole where they got in, cutting wood with a power saw down in the basement. She comes up wearing a toolbelt
and lugging a ladder. I’ve seen a scrapbook of photos of her wearing evening gowns with a banner across her chest and a crown
on her head. Curled hair, lipstick. She climbs down and puts the tools away. We eat nachos.

“I only make food that’s boiled or melted these days,” I tell her.

“I know,” she replies.

We smoke cigarettes and think. The phone rings again but whoever it is hangs up.

“Is it him?” she asks.

“Nope.”

The collie sleeps on her blankets while the other two dogs sit next to Caroline on the couch. She’s looking through their
ears for mites. At some point she gestures to the sleeping dog on the blanket and remarks that it seems like just two days
ago she was a puppy.

“She was never a puppy,” I say. “She’s always been older than me.”

When they say good-bye, she holds the collie’s long nose in one hand and kisses her on the forehead; the collie stares back
at her gravely. Caroline is crying when she leaves, a combination of squirrel adrenaline, and sadness. I cry, too, although
I don’t feel particularly bad about anything. I hand her the zucchini through the window and she pulls away from the curb.

The house is starting to get dark in that terrible early-evening twilit way. I turn on lights, get a cigarette, and go upstairs
to the former squirrel room. The black dog comes with me and circles the room, snorting loudly, nose to floor. There is a
spot of turmoil in an open box — they made a nest in some old disco shirts from the seventies. I suspect that’s where the
baby one slept. The mean landlady has evicted them.

Downstairs, I turn the lights back off and let evening have its way with me. Waves of pre-nighttime nervousness are coming
from the collie’s blanket. I sit next to her in the dimness, touching her ears, and listen for feet at the top of the stairs.

They’re speaking in physics so I’m left out of the conversation. Chris apologetically erases one of the pictures I’ve drawn
on the
blackboard and replaces it with a curving blue arrow surrounded by radiating chalk waves of green.

“If it’s plasma, make it in red,” I suggest helpfully. We’re all smoking illegally in the journal office with the door closed
and the window open. We’re having a plasma party.

“We aren’t discussing
plasma
,” Bob says condescendingly. He’s smoking a horrendously smelly pipe. The longer he stays in here the more it feels like I’m
breathing small daggers in through my nose. He and I don’t get along; each of us thinks the other needs to be taken down a
peg. Once we had a hissing match in the hallway which ended with him suggesting that I could be fired, which drove me to tell
him he was
already
fired, and both of us stomped into our offices and slammed our doors.

“I had to fire Bob,” I tell Chris later.

“I heard,” he says noncommittally. Bob is his best friend. They spend at least half of each day standing in front of chalkboards,
writing equations and arguing about outer space. Then they write theoretical papers about what they come up with. They’re
actually quite a big deal in the space physics community, but around here they’re just two guys who keep erasing my pictures.

Someone knocks on the door and we put our cigarettes out. Bob hides his pipe in the palm of his hand and opens the door.

It’s Gang Lu, one of their students. Everyone lights up again. Gang Lu stands stiffly talking to Chris while Bob holds a match
to his pipe and puffs fiercely; nose daggers waft up and out, right in my direction. I give him a sugary smile and he gives
me one back. Unimaginable, really, that less than two months from now one of his colleagues from abroad, a woman with delicate,
birdlike features, will appear at the door to my office and identify herself as a friend of Bob’s. When she asks, I take her
down the hall to the room with the long table and then to his empty
office. I do this without saying anything because there’s nothing to say, and she takes it all in with small, serious nods
until the moment she sees his blackboard covered with scribbles and arrows and equations. At that point her face loosens and
she starts to cry in long ragged sobs. An hour later I go back and the office is empty. When I erase the blackboard finally,
I can see where she laid her hands carefully, where the numbers are ghostly and blurred.

Bob blows his smoke discreetly in my direction and waits for Chris to finish talking to Gang Lu, who is answering questions
in a monotone — yes or no, or I don’t know. Another Chinese student named Shan lets himself in after knocking lightly. He
nods and smiles at me and then stands at a respectful distance, waiting to ask Chris a question.

It’s like a physics conference in here. I wish they’d all leave so I could make my usual midafternoon spate of personal calls.
I begin thumbing through papers in a businesslike way.

Bob pokes at his pipe with a bent paper clip. Shan yawns hugely and then looks embarrassed. Chris erases what he put on the
blackboard and tries unsuccessfully to redraw my pecking parakeet. “I don’t know how it goes,” he says to me.

Gang Lu looks around the room idly with expressionless eyes. He’s sick of physics and sick of the buffoons who practice it.
The tall glacial German, Chris, who tells him what to do; the crass idiot Bob who talks to him like he is a dog; the student
Shan whose ideas about plasma physics are treated with reverence and praised at every meeting. The woman who puts her feet
on the desk and dismisses him with her eyes. Gang Lu no longer spends his evenings in the computer lab, running simulations
and thinking about magnetic forces and invisible particles; he now spends them at the firing range, learning to hit a moving
target with the gun he purchased last spring. He pictures himself holding the gun with both hands, arms straight
out and steady; Clint Eastwood, only smarter. Clint Eastwood as a rocket scientist.

He stares at each person in turn, trying to gauge how much respect each of them has for him. One by one. Behind black-rimmed
glasses, he counts with his eyes. In each case the verdict is clear: not enough.

The collie fell down the basement stairs. I don’t know if she was disoriented and looking for me or what. But when I was at
work she used her long nose like a lever and got the door to the basement open and tried to go down there except her legs
wouldn’t do it and she fell. I found her sleeping on the concrete floor in an unnatural position, one leg still awkwardly
resting on the last step. I repositioned the leg and sat down next to her and petted her. We used to play a game called Maserati,
where I’d grab her nose like a gearshift and put her through all the gears, first second third fourth, until we were going
a hundred miles an hour through town. She thought it was funny.

Now I’m at work but this morning there’s nothing to do, and every time I turn around I see her sprawled, eyes mute, leg bent
upward. We’re breaking each other’s hearts. I draw a picture of her on the blackboard using brown chalk. I make
X
s where her eyes should be. Chris walks in with the morning paper and a cup of coffee. He looks around the clean office.

“Why are you here when there’s no work to do?” he asks.

“I’m hiding from my life, what else,” I tell him. This sounds perfectly reasonable to him. He gives me part of the paper.

His mother is visiting from Germany, a robust woman of eighty who is depressed and hoping to be cheered up. In the last year
she has lost her one-hundred-year-old mother and her husband of sixty years. She mostly can’t be cheered up, but she likes
going to art galleries so Chris has been driving her around
the Midwest, to our best cities, showing her what kind of art Americans like to look at.

“How’s your mom?” I ask him.

He shrugs and makes a flat-handed so-so motion.

We read, smoke, drink coffee, and yawn. I decide to go home.

“Good idea,” he says encouragingly.

It’s November 1, 1991, the last day of the first part of my life. Before I leave I pick up the eraser and stand in front of
the collie’s picture on the blackboard, thinking. I can feel him watching me, drinking his coffee. He’s wearing a gold shirt
and blue jeans and a gray cardigan sweater. He is tall and lanky and white-haired, forty-seven years old. He has a wife named
Ulrike, a daughter named Karein, and a son named Goran. A dog named Mica. A mother named Ursula. A friend named me.

I erase the
X
s.

Down the hall, Linhua Shan feeds numbers into a computer and watches as a graph is formed. The computer screen is brilliant
blue, and the lines appear in red and yellow and green. Four keystrokes and the green becomes purple. More keystrokes and
the blue background fades to the azure of a summer sky. The wave lines arc over it, crossing against one another. He asks
the computer to print, and while it chugs along he pulls up a golf game on the screen and tees off.

One room over, at a desk, Gang Lu works on a letter to his sister in China.
The study of physics is more and more disappointing
, he tells her.
Modern physics is self-delusion
and
all my life I have been honest and straightforward, and I have most of all detested cunning, fawning sycophants and dishonest
bureaucrats who think they are always right in everything
. Delicate Chinese characters all over a page. She was a kind and gentle sister, and he thanks her for that. He’s going to
kill himself.
You yourself should not be too sad about it, for at least I have found a few
traveling companions to accompany me to the grave
. Inside the coat on the back of his chair are a .38-caliber handgun and a .22-caliber revolver. They’re heavier than they
look and weigh the pockets down.
My beloved elder sister, I take my eternal leave of you.

The collie’s eyes are almond-shaped; I draw them in with brown chalk and put a white bone next to her feet.

“That’s better,” Chris says kindly.

Before I leave the building I pass Gang Lu in the hallway and say hello. He has a letter in his hand and he’s wearing his
coat. He doesn’t answer and I don’t expect him to. At the end of the hallway are the double doors leading to the rest of my
life. I push them open and walk through.

Friday afternoon seminar, everyone is glazed over, listening as someone explains something unexplainable at the head of the
long table. Gang Lu stands up and leaves the room abruptly; goes down one floor to see if the chairman, Dwight, is sitting
in his office. He is. The door is open. Gang Lu turns and walks back up the stairs and enters the meeting room again. Chris
Goertz is sitting near the door and takes the first bullet in the back of the head. There is a loud popping sound and then
blue smoke. Shan gets the second bullet in the forehead, the lenses of his glasses shatter. More smoke and the room rings
with the popping. Bob Smith tries to crawl beneath the table. Gang Lu takes two steps, holds his arms straight out, and levels
the gun with both hands. Bob looks up. The third bullet in the right hand, the fourth in the chest. Smoke. Elbows and legs,
people trying to get out of the way and then out of the room.

Gang Lu walks quickly down the stairs, dispelling spent cartridges and loading new ones. From the doorway of Dwight’s office:
the fifth bullet in the head, the sixth strays, the seventh
also in the head. A slumping. More smoke and ringing. Through the cloud an image comes forward — Bob Smith, hit in the chest,
hit in the hand, still alive. Back up the stairs. Two scientists, young men, crouched over Bob, loosening his clothes, talking
to him. From where he lies, Bob can see his best friend still sitting upright in a chair, head thrown back at an unnatural
angle. Everything is broken and red. The two young scientists leave the room at gunpoint. Bob closes his eyes. The eighth
and ninth bullets in his head. As Bob dies, Chris Goertz’s body settles in his chair, a long sigh escapes his throat. Reload.
Two more for Chris, one for Shan. Exit the building, cross two streets, run across the green, into building number two and
upstairs.

The administrator, Anne Cleary, is summoned from her office by the receptionist. She speaks to him for a few seconds, he produces
the gun and shoots her in the face. The receptionist, a young student working as a temp, is just beginning to stand when he
shoots her in the mouth. He dispels the spent cartridges in the stairwell, loads new ones. Reaches the top of the steps, looks
around. Is disoriented suddenly. The ringing and the smoke and the dissatisfaction of not checking all the names off the list.
A slamming and a running sound, the shout of police. He walks into an empty classroom, takes off his coat, folds it carefully
and puts it over the back of the chair. Checks his watch; twelve minutes since it began. Places the barrel against his right
temple. Fires.