From The Kenyon Review, New Series,
Summer/Fall 1997, Vol. XIX, No. 3-4
If you don’t know how you got somewhere you don’t know where you are.
–James Burke
A blue-million of ’em” my aunt always says—we were looking up
above Lexington for a meteor shower and saw only the unmitigated
skyline; too much light too close to us, all those electrons going
to town, diffuse between the air around us. I’d seen it once before,
the night full of flares, sparking out of nowhere, vanishing again
into the otherwise empty scope of things. But a vacuum, it turns out,
is never truly empty. Even when the universe was nothing more
than a held breath, a vast lake flat with helium and hydrogen,
it only took a hiccup in that slick molecular mix for every ten billion
quark/anti-quark pairs created and annihilated in that first blast
toward light, to leave one extra quark behind—a tiny surplus—all
that was required to evolve the chain link clusters and whirligigs
we point to today. Apparently something can emerge from nothing—
virtual particles buzz like halos around real ones, and that pretty much
accounts for biological creatures like ourselves who look up and petition
the pinpoint night, who find at our fingertips language for that dimension-
less place, name animals and plants, the spins on sub-atomic particles,
their “flavors”—Strange and Charmed. Untied from the unities and set
stumbling about, we arrived at parallel universes—on the bubble, stacked up,
bottled, bright ships on a black expanding shelf, not a supporting speck
of evidence for something that may or may not be there, wherever
“there” might be. We had a ranch house on the coast, a yard burning
with wild nasturtiums, clusters of blue pines, and periwinkle,
and a station wagon on time which let us slip unnoticed through
the streets of suburbia, no one imagining mother and I sharing
a can of tomato soup with fried bologna on wheat all those nights
father was working late. We sat in the kitchen, the GE radio—
purple, plastic, the size of a bread box—on the table. Its one clock-like
dial coaxed in music always less interesting than the warped tones
and oscillations I found flipping between stations. I pulled in the blank
imponderable sounds of space and peeked through the hundred holes
in the Masonite backing to the tubes-orange filaments glowing
beneath their dusk-dark caps like the tails of comets—and each night
hadn’t the least idea where it all was headed. Soon enough, TVs appeared,
and by the end of the fifties the future was clear in a set whose mahogany
cabinet doors opened to Buck Rogers, Rocky and the Space Pirates,
or Saturday mornings of posses and bandidos, six-shooters firing
all over Malibu or Chatsworth, and tree-thick back lots of L.A., glorious
in black & white where heroes galloped off over the sunset hills and
disappeared in a cloud of dust. After staring at a bombardment of electrons
all morning, I was sent out to play in our wide neighborhood, the boundaries
of which I knew well. I was tethered to the daylight’s long string unraveling
from all that vacant and unquestioned space beyond our drive, and charged
only to find my way home before the first star appeared again in the sky.
