Origins of the Universe and What It All Means Read online

  Origins of the Universe

  and What It All Means

  Origins of

  the Universe

  and What It

  All Means

  Carole

  Firstman

  5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd.

  Ann Arbor, MI 48103

  www.dzancbooks.org

  ORIGINS OF THE UNIVERSE AND WHAT IT ALL MEANS. Copyright © 2016, text by Carole Firstman. All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Dzanc Books, 5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48103.

  Parts of this book have been published, in varying forms, in Colorado Review, Knee-Jerk Magazine, Lifestyle Magazine, Man in the Moon: Essays on Fathers and Fatherhood, Reed Magazine, South Dakota Review, and Watershed Review.

  First US edition: August 2016

  ISBN: 978-1-941088-72-2

  Book design by Steven Seighman

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Firstman, Carole, 1964- author.

  Title: Origins of the universe and what it all means : a memoir / Carole Firstman.

  Description: Ann Arbor, MI : Dzanc Books, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015035099 | ISBN 9781941088722

  Subjects: LCSH: Firstman, Carole, 1964—Family. | Authors, American—21st century—Family relationships. | Fathers and daughters—United States. | Essayists—United States—Biography. | Authors, American—21st century—Biography.

  Classification: LCC CT275.F5547 A3 2016 | DDC 808.84—dc23LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015035099

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To my family of origin: Bruce, Aranga, and David.

  And to Karl, the center of my universe.

  Contents

  PART I

  LIGHT, TIME, EARTH

  PART II

  SCORPIONS, SNAKES

  PART III

  SITTING-UP MUD

  PART IV

  STARRY NIGHTS

  PART V

  SONGBIRDS

  PART VI

  THE FACE OF PERFECTION

  PART VII

  PRESENCE

  PART I

  Light, Time, Earth

  One

  In the beginning there was darkness.

  Two

  Mojave Desert, California (July, 1969)—

  Watch us.

  We barreled across the desert toward Death Valley, gray waves of heat seething from the highway. The top of the Karmann Ghia was off and my mother’s brown hair flew wildly around her sweating face. It was nearly noon. The sun blazed directly overhead. It must have been a hundred and five degrees by then. The engine ran hot and if we didn’t get there soon we’d overheat. Stranded on the road.

  Me in the backseat: sitting squarely in the middle, my legs folded, sticky against white vinyl. I was five years old. My sweater wrapped around my forehead like a turban, tight; the empty arms streamed behind in the wind, flapping between my shoulder blades. I pretended the sweater sleeves were my hair. Long, luxurious. Sexy. Yes, sexy—even at five, I knew what that meant. I’d seen plenty of pictures, glossy pages my father had thumbtacked to the wall at home, a mosaic of Playboy centerfolds next to his desk, all of them honey-skinned with waist-long hair draped between their breasts. My favorite was a Polynesian-looking woman with thick wooden bracelets and a tie-dye scarf knotted above one ear. One time I stripped down to my blousy cotton underpants and wore the necklace I’d found at the back my father’s bottom desk drawer—a peace sign pendant on a long, heavy gold chain, which I now assume a certain student had given him as a gift—and veiled my short, pixie-cut hair in a tablecloth. Alone in my parents’ bedroom I drew the tablecloth tightly around the top of my head and held it in place above one ear, like the woman in the photo. I paraded in front of the full-length mirror, stepping diagonally to one side, spinning abruptly on my heels in order to catch the chain’s reflection as it bounced against my skin. The tablecloth billowed from my shoulders then draped toward the center of my chest, framing the pendent that dangled just above my navel. Two more steps and turn again. Billow, sparkle, drape. Back and forth I went in front of the mirror, pivoting so quickly I almost lost my balance.

  In the car, I imagined myself again as that Polynesian woman. I bounced with the road beneath us, beneath the tires, tires that smelled like tar in that heat. Up ahead, the asphalt ribboned up and down like a gentle rollercoaster. I held my breath every few seconds, just for an instant each time; it helped me hold onto the falling feeling in my stomach. Falling with each decline. Yes. Now again. “Faster,” I yelled, or maybe I just thought it. Faster.

  That summer, my mother was twenty-four, a grad student studying plant pathology. My father was forty-one, a professor at Cal Poly Pomona. His mission to collect spiders, specimens for his class on the evolution of arachnids, meant a working getaway weekend for him, for us. Underneath the passenger seat, a shoe-box rattled with empty jars and half-filled bottles of formaldehyde. Several times that day, and throughout the weekend, my father pulled over when he got the whim. He’d traipse through the gravel on his hands and knees. My mother carried the box of jars while he peered between rocks. He captured scorpions, tarantulas, and desert weevil beetles with an overturned glass jar and three-by-five index cards covered with obsolete to-do lists or random notes-to-self: “Milk, cottage cheese, bread,” “arterial system: peri-intestinal vascular membrane.” Recently, while cleaning out my father’s home, I found a box of letters and a tattered card on which was scratched, “Fondly, P.” There in the desert, with one swift move, he would flip the jar and the card, drop the live spider into another jar filled with formaldehyde, then screw on a lid to seal it tight. Death was instant. Then back to the car.

  Behind the wheel, my father stepped on the accelerator. He turned the radio dial. The Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” blared from the dashboard, the words swept up by scarves of heat and spewed over the cactus-spotted sand.

  As an adult, the memories click for me like a slideshow, each landscape a framed portrait. Isolated. Self-contained. Cropped. I recall a certain spot on the road to Furnace Creek, somewhere in the middle of that expansive desert. The Kodachrome slide in my mind features a straight segment of highway, one lane in each direction divided by a double yellow line. Black asphalt shoots diagonally across the frame from bottom right to top left, leading the eye from a textured foreground to a blurry, westbound destination. Alongside the road is a diamond-shaped sign with an arrow pointing to the right. It seems contradictory—a warning for an upcoming right turn on what appears to be a straight stretch of road. Surely it’s just my memory that’s cropped the actual curve in the road from the snapshot frame. Surely my parents saw the road and the curve, too.

  High noon: through the wind my mother silently argued with my father, her lips pinched, her eyes narrowed to slits.

  My father didn’t curse or raise his voice. He just stated the facts. “Her name is Pat,” he said. “She needs a pad, a place to crash. Just for a while. A few weeks.”

  My mother stared out the windshield. The back of her neck splotched red. Heat rash, perhaps.

  “No reason to get bent out of shape,” my father said. “If you want to keep living with me, and I want you to, the house is plenty big. Pat can live downstairs. Otherwise, you’re free to go.”

  My mother still said nothing, just turned her head to the right. Her eyes trained on a yucca plant rooted in the roadside gravel. Its pointy leaves barbed dangero
usly close to our car. We zoomed past, the white bloom arching, swaying overhead. Swaying above my shirtsleeve hair.

  Three

  Visalia, Central California (2010)—

  I recently found a scorpion on my father’s desk, which I have since stolen. Not a live creature, but a specimen, long pickled in formaldehyde. The handwritten label inside the jar reads: Paruroctonus sil-vestrii: Las Estacas, Mexico—1971. The scorpion floats in suspended animation, trapped in the jar I balance on the flat of my palm, its body preserved for display. Appearing neither dead nor alive, it hovers near the bottom, leaving an almost imperceptible gap between its abdomen and the glass that rests in my hand.

  I discovered it a few days after my father telephoned from Mexico to say he has decided to stay there until he dies. “I’m not long for this world. I need you to ship me some things,” he said, so I reached for the notepad next to my computer and took down his requests, an itemized list that would trigger my weeklong scavenger hunt inside his unoccupied Central California home, my discovery of this particular scorpion specimen bottled on the shelf above his desk—and my subsequent thievery. Although my father built a career, a life, around his research on the evolution of arachnids—spiders, mites, and scorpions—he made no mention of his specimen collection the day he rattled his list into the receiver.

  “The Great Courses DVD collection, and the most recent catalogue from The Teaching Company,” he said. His voice cracked with urgency. “My Encyclopedia Britannica set, including the annual almanacs. Posters of Blue Boy and Pinkie—the reproductions I got last year at the Huntington Museum, not the photocopies in my bedroom, but the original posters. You’ll have to remove them from the frames.”

  With the phone clamped between my shoulder and jaw, I repeated the list back to him.

  He added a few more items, then proceeded to describe in utmost detail where each object could be found inside his house.

  “I know where it all is,” I said several times, and “Yes, of course I know that too.” His house is just five doors down from mine and I know the layout quite well. But he didn’t stop no matter how many I knows I uttered, because once he gets going on a train of thought it’s impossible for him to stop. Impossible.

  After a while I doodled on the notepad, saying “uh-huh” every few seconds.

  My father had gone to Irapuato, Mexico, at my urging. A few months earlier, my brother David and I had bought him a one-way ticket with the vague promise of a return flight at his convenience. We hoped that without a specific return date, he might be more inclined to stay longer than three weeks—perhaps forever. This isn’t quite as harsh as it seems. For decades my dad has dreamed of moving there permanently, surrounded by the language and landscape he loves, the deserts and beaches and mountains where he gathered arachnid specimens for half a century. He also has extended family there: his deceased wife’s family, and my brother David’s family, including my sister-in-law Penny and their two young girls. He would be near lots of relatives who could look after him. Relatives other than me. Far, far away.

  Among the things he requested were his Great Books of the Western World, a hardbound series published in 1952, fifty-four volumes covering classic literature, including works of fiction, history, natural science, philosophy, mathematics, and religion. I didn’t tell him that the information contained in these books is readily available on the Internet, or that it would be cheaper for him to mail order new books and have them sent directly to his apartment in Mexico. He doesn’t use computers, and anyway, once he sets his mind to something, he disregards all other options.

  “On the bookcase next to my bed,” he said. As always, he over-pronounced his words: /book-kās/ with a double k sound, /nek-st / in two syllables.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “I must have them with me. They are monumental works by and about great authors. The most influential thinkers of our time.”

  I know, I know, I fucking know. But I did not say this either, because I’ve long understood that once he gets started he cannot stop. Cannot.

  “Be sure to include the supplemental texts on Aristotle. Aristotle lived from 384 BC until 322 BC. He was a student of Plato and he taught Alexander the Great.”

  My father’s speech patterns—his vocabulary and syntax—are unusually formal. Classic Asperger’s, from what I understand, albeit undiagnosed. His mannerisms certainly balance on the edge of the autism spectrum. Strained social interaction, repetitive patterns of behavior, hyper focus on specific interests—these traits manifest themselves as tiny droplets of personality toxins, not fatal, but unpleasant.

  I doodled through his monologue on Plato and the dates of Chaucer and Sir Francis Bacon.

  Also on his list: five pairs of leather shoes, four new suits, a case of unopened vitamin supplements, odor-free garlic tablets, a carton of bottles labeled ALL NATURAL MALE ENHANCEMENT, a small leather-bound address book, back issues of Scientific American, and several file folders of correspondence—each labeled by name—one marked STEPHEN JAY GOULD.

  “I’ll be so grateful for you to send me these things, Carole.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m on the line between life and death. These things will keep me alive longer, do you understand?”

  I suppose I said the things one is expected to say to a father. I suppose I said, Don’t be silly. You’re not dying anytime soon, or Stop talking such nonsense, or But I thought you’d live to be one hundred and five—remember your plan? You’re only eighty-two, so you have twenty-three years to go. Or maybe I didn’t say those things, but thought them instead. Our conversations are so cyclical, the topics so recurrent, including his ever-immediately impending death—which he’s been predicting for some forty years now—that I often lose track of what I’ve specifically said on which day.

  I cradled the phone against my jaw and bulleted each item with little curly-cues. In that moment I wasn’t sure if I was a good daughter or a bad one. I said the things a daughter should say, carried out actions expected of me, took dictation, wrote the list—but part of me considered throwing the list away, folding it in half and letting it go in the breeze outside. While my father prepared for his final respite by gathering earthly items of comfort and interest, things to make his remaining life enjoyable, I wasn’t sure I wanted to deliver. Perhaps if I withheld his treasures he would postpone his passage from this world—stave off death—in which case my inclination to tear up the list was morally just. On the other hand, my withholding would cause him some degree of discomfort. I could let him squirm down there in Mexico—waiting and waiting for his things that would never arrive—pinch him with passive-aggressive retaliation for my accumulated list of his past transgressions, a fuzzy litany I haven’t fully articulated even to myself. Good daughter or bad? Perhaps I was both in that moment, a morally liminal creature with one foot on each side.

  “Are you getting this all down?” he asked.

  Four

  Hordes of specimen jars once filled both my father’s offices, one at the university where he taught in Southern California and a second study at home. Years after my parents split, he lived for a while in a double-wide mobile home in Chino where the hollow floor shook if you stepped too heavily, sending vibrations up the walls and rattling rows of specimen jars on their plywood shelves. When I was a teenager, visiting during the summer, I once slammed the door on purpose just to watch my friend Lana’s reaction as the scorpions fluttered momentarily to life, their legs and pincers gently rising in rippling isopropyl tides sloshing rim to rim. I laughed when her shoulders instinctually flapped up and down in heebie-jeebie, get-them-off-me reflex. Her mouth contorted to expose her clenched teeth and she involuntarily bent forward to slap her bare shins repeatedly, as if the reptilian, survival part of her brain were unable to differentiate between real and imagined threats. While I now know that her reactive behavior typifies our genetic predisposition to fear animals that once posed a danger to ancient humans (as you can see, I’ve inherite
d some of my father’s diction), I reveled in the in-between moment of unspoken what-ifs racing at lightning speed behind Lana’s wide eyes, the what-should-I-do hypothetical scenario playing out in her head as her hypothalamus and sensory cortex conversed, assessing the repercussion of every decision should these scorpions be alive and loose.

  Suppose you were bitten by a scorpion. Let’s say the Deathstalker, Apistobuthus pterygocercus. The initial sting feels like several bee stings at once. You cry out in pain, then kick your foot into the air to jolt the scorpion from your ankle. Your heart races, banging furiously against your sternum; has the scorpion’s venom caused your heart to pound, or is this merely a psychological reaction, you wonder. You linger for a few minutes, suspended in inaction, indecision—should you seek medical attention or just let the pain in your ankle subside? Let’s say you wait it out. No need for drama. Scorpion stings are overrated, overplayed—the stories of agonizing deaths are urban legends grown to monstrosities, you reason. So you apply an ice pack to ease the pain in your ankle, the red circle radiating from the point of contact. Your heart pounds harder. Blood thrushes against your eardrums. You feel hot. You start to sweat. You close your eyes, lean back on the couch, and elevate your ankle with a pile of throw pillows. As neurotoxins surge through your brain, they clamp onto sodium channels, alternately blocking and activating signals to your nervous system.

  The first convulsions take you by surprise—your arms tremble, your feet tingle, your lower abdomen contracts several times, like a shiver but stronger. You’re neither moving your body nor are you still, you think; you quake on the threshold of voluntary physical action and involuntary reaction. It’s time to seek help, so you look at the phone a few feet away; but within just this sliver of time, the time you took to contemplate your situation, paralysis has crept in. Your eyelids slam back in their utmost open position, your eyeballs halt, trapped in a frozen gaze, and your limbs, trembling, flop up and down with the rhythm of your heaving torso as it folds and unfolds like a piece of paper trapped in the wind. Finally your blood pressure drops and muscles release, loose again. The last thing you see is the telephone nestled uselessly in its cradle, and as fluid secretions seep into your lungs and pain-killing endorphins flood your brain, you welcome the coma, the sleep, the flood of deep relaxation that feels so, so good.