Authors: Ellen Gilchrist
“I never drove in a Jeep with you from Willits to the ocean while listening to Italian tapes. I would remember that, Nieman.
Why do you always ask me that? It’s a loose wire in your head, a precursor of dreaded things to come.” Then Freddy would smile
and shake his head and later talk about it to his psychiatrist or Nora Jane. “Nieman’s fixated on thinking I drove with him
in a Jeep listening to an Italian tape,” he would say. “About once a year he starts on that. It’s like the budding of the
trees. Once a year, in winter, he decides the two of us took that trip and nothing will convince him otherwise. He gets mad
at me because I can’t remember it. Can you believe it?”
Outside the small town of Nova,Nieman found a trail he had used before.It led to a beach the townpeople used during good weather.
He parked the Jeep in a gravel clearing and they got out and climbed down a path to the water. The ocean was very dramatic,
with huge boulders jutting into the entrance of a small harbor. The snow was melting on the path. Even now, in the heart of
winter, moss was forming on the rocks. —The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,— Nieman said.
“Dylan is happy now,” Leonardo answered. “A charming man. I go to him quite often and he recites poetry. It makes the poetry
he wrote when he was here seem primitive. I should not tell you that, of course. We try never to say such things.”
“Look at the ocean,” Nieman answered. “What mystery could be greater. Shouldn’t this be enough for any man to attempt to understand?
This force, this power, this place where land and air meet the sea?. this goodly frame, the earth …this most excellent canopy,
the air …this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire…’”
“Will loved the sea and wrote of it but had little time for it. Plato was the same. He talked and wrote of it but didn’t take
the time to ponder it as we are doing. Of course, in other ages time seemed more valuable. Life was short and seemed more
fleeting.”
They were walking along a strip of sand only ten to twenty feet wide. It was low tide. Later in the day it would have been
impossible to walk here and they would have had to use the higher path.
“We could just stay here,” Nieman said. “We don’t have to go to the labs. I just thought you might want to see the microscopes.”
“We have all day.”
“They’re leaving the labs open in the biochemistry building. We can go to Berkeley or we can stay here. I saw you looking
at the atlas. Did you memorize it? I mean, is that how you do it?”
“I remember it. It is very fine how they have mapped the floor of the oceans. Is it exact, do you think?”
“Pretty much so at the time of mapping. The sand shifts,everything shifts and changes. They map the floor with soundings,
with radar. When you leave here, where do you have to be? Is there some gathering place? Do you just walk off? Where do you
go?”
“I just won’t be here.”
“Will the clothes be here? I only wondered. That’s Freddy’s coat. I could get him another one but he’s pretty fond of that
one. He took it to Tibet.”
Nieman moved nearer to Leonardo, his eyes shifting wildly. The day had a sort of rhythm. Sometimes it was just beating along.
Then suddenly he imagined it whole and that made his heart beat frantically. “I don’t care, of course. You can take it if
you need to. You can have anything I have.”
“I will leave the clothes. It would be a waste to take them.”
“When will you go? How long will it be? You have to understand. I never had a father. No man ever stayed long enough. I was
always getting left on my own. It’s been a problem for me all my life.”
Leonardo turned to face him. “This is not a father who leaves, Nieman. This is the realm of knowledge, which you always longed
for and long for now. It is always available, it never goes away, it cannot desert you, it cannot fail you. It is yours. It
belongs to whoever longs for it. If you desert it, it is always waiting, like those waves. It comes back and back like the
sea. I am only a moment of what is available to you. When I am gone the clothes will be here and you can wear them when you
are reading things that are difficult to understand. You will read everything now. You will learn many languages. You will
know much more than you know now. Tell me about the microscopes.”
“I haven’t used one yet. But I can tell you how it works. It concentrates a beam of electrons in a tube to scan or penetrate
the thing you want magnified. It makes a photograph using light and dark and shadow. The photograph is very accurate and magnified
a million times. Then a portion of that photograph can be magnified several million more times. It’s so easy for me to believe
the photographs so I think it must be something I know. My friend, Freddy, thinks we know everything back to the first cell,
that all discovery is simply plugging into memory banks. Memory at the level of biochemistry. Which is why I can’t believe
it took me so long to begin to study this. I had to start in the arts. My mother is a frustrated actress. I’ve been working
her program for forty-four years. Now it’s my turn. But this is plain to you. You’re the one who saw the relationship between
art and science. It never occurred to you not to do both.”
“I am honored to be here for your birth of understanding. Where I am, the minds are past their early enthusiasms. I miss seeing
the glint in eyes. I miss the paintbrush in my hand and the smell of paints. If you wish to show me this microscope we can
go there now. The sea is very old. We don’t have to stay beside it all day.”
It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive to Berkeley. They drove along the western ridge of the Cascade Range, within a sea breeze
of the Mendocino Fracture Zone. Beside the Russian River. They drove to Mendocino, then Littleriver, then Albion. At Albion
they cut off onto Highway 128 and drove along the Navarro River to Cloverdale. They went by Santa Rosa, then Petaluma, then
Novato, and down and across the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge and on to Berkeley.
It was six o’clock when they arrived at the campus. It was dark and the last students were mounting their bicycles as they
left the biochemistry building. Nieman nosed the Jeep into a faculty parking space and they got out and entered the building
through iron doors and went down a hall to an elevator.
“Have you been on one of these?” Nieman asked, holding the elevator door with his hand. “It’s a box on a pulley, actually.
It’s quite safe. When they were new sometimes they would get stuck. Some pretty funny jokes and stories came out of that.
Also, there were tragedies, lack of oxygen and so forth. This one is thirty years old at least, but it’s safe.”
“Arabic,” Leonardo said, touching the numbered buttons with his finger. “I thought it would continue to be useful.”
“The numbers? Oh, yes. Everyone uses the same system. Based on the fingers and toes. Five fingers on each hand. Two arms,
two legs. Binary system and digital system. We run our computers on the binary system. It’s fascinating. What man has done.
There’s one playwright dealing with it, a man named Stoppard.” Leonardo stepped back and stood near Nieman. Nieman pressed
2 and the box rose in space on its pulley and the door opened.
Waiting for them on the second-floor hall was the head of university security. He was wearing a blue uniform with silver buttons.
“Hello,” he said. “If you’re Mr. Gluuk they have a lady waiting for you. President Culver said to tell you she’d show you
the machines.”
“Oh, that wasn’t necessary. We only wanted to look at them.” He took Leonardo’s arm. So he looks like a genius who has spent
a thousand years on a Buddhist prayer bench. So the smile is so dazzling it hypnotizes people. No one would imagine this.
No one would believe it.
“Don’t I know you from when I was a student?” Nieman asked. “I’m Nieman Gluuk. I used to edit the school paper. In the seventies.
Didn’t you guard the building when we had the riots in seventy-five?”
“I thought I knew you. I’m Abel Kennedy. I was a rookie that year and you kept me supplied with cookies and coffee in the
newspaper office. I’m head of security now.” Captain Kennedy held out his hand and Nieman shook it. He was trying to decide
how to introduce Leonardo when a door opened down the hall and a woman came walking toward them. She was of medium height
with short blond hair. She was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt. Over the shirt was a long white
vest. There were pencils and pens in the pockets of the vest. A pair of horn-rimmed glasses was on her head. Another pair
was in her hand.
“I was wondering if one could wear bifocals to look into the scope,” Nieman said. “I was afraid I’d have to get contact lenses
to study science.”
“It’s a screen.” She laughed. “I’m Stella Light. My parents were with the Merry Pranksters. Some joke. I meant to have it
changed but I never did.” She held out her hand to Nieman. Long slender fingers. Nails bitten off to the quick. No rings.
She smiled again.
“I’m Nieman Gluuk. This is our distinguished guest, Leo Gluuk, a cousin from Madrid. I mean, Florence. Also from Minneapolis.”
“Make up your mind. Nice to meet you. I’ve read your stuff. I’m from Western Oregon. Well, what exactly can we do for you?”
“Just let us see the microscopes. Leo is very interested in the technology. It’s extremely nice of you to stay late like this.
I know your days are long enough already.”
“I was here anyway. We’ve had an outbreak of salmonella in the valley. We’re trying to help out with that. It gets on the
chicken skin in the packing plants or if they are defrosted incorrectly. Well, I’ll let you see slides of that. They’re fresh.”
They walked down a hall to a room with the door ajar. Inside, on a long curved table, was the console. In the center, covered
with a metal that looked more like gold than brass, was the scanning electron microscope. The pride of the Berkeley labs.
They moved into the open doorway. Leonardo had been completely quiet. Now he gave Stella the smile and she stepped back and
let him precede her into the room. She and Leonardo sat down at the console. She got out a box of slides and lifted one from
the box with a set of calipers. She slid it into a notch and locked it down. Then she pushed a button and an image appeared
on the screen. “To 0.2 nanometers,” she said. “We can photograph it and go higher.”
Nieman leaned over their shoulders and looked into the screen. It was a range of hills covered with cocoons. “A World War
I battlefield,” he said. “Corpses strewn everywhere. Is that the salmonella?”
“Yes. Let’s enlarge it.” She pushed another button. The hill turned into crystal mountains. Now it was the Himalayas. Range
after range of crystals. Nieman looked down at his own arm. In a nanometer of skin was all that wonder.
Leonardo began asking questions about the machine, about the metal of which it was made, about the vacuum through which the
electrons traveled, how the image was created. Stella answered the questions as well as she could. She bent over him. She
put pieces of paper in front of him. She put slides into the microscope. She asked no questions. She had been completely mesmerized
by the smile. She would remember nothing of the encounter. Except a momentary excitement when she was alone in the room at
night. She thought it was sexual. She thought it was about Nieman. There I go, she would scold herself, getting interested
in yet another man I cannot understand. The daddy track, chugging on down the line to lonesome valley.
They stayed in the laboratory for half an hour. Then they wandered out into the hall and found a second microscope and Stella
took the thing apart and let Leonardo examine the parts. Then she let him reassemble it. She stood beside Nieman. She sized
him up. He was better looking than his photograph in the paper. His skin was so white and clear. He was kind.
“You really quit your job?” she asked.
“A leave of absence. I was burned out.”
“Who is he?” she asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone I liked as much.”
“We all love him. The family adores him. But it’s hard to keep track of him. He travels all the time.”
Leonardo put everything back into its place. He laid Stella’s pencil on top of the stack of papers and got up from the chair.
“We are finished now,” he said. “We should be leaving. We thank you for your kindness.”
Stella walked them to the elevator. They got on and she stood smiling after them. When they had left she went back into the
laboratory and worked until after twelve. Two children had died in the salmonella outbreak. Twenty were hospitalized. The
infected food had reached a grade school lunchroom.
When they left the building there was a full moon in the sky. There was so much light it cast shadows. Leonardo walked with
Nieman to the Jeep. “I am leaving,” he said. “You will be fine.” He kissed Nieman on the cheek, then on the forehead. Then
he was gone. Nieman tried to follow him but he did not know how. When he got back to the Jeep, the clothes Leonardo had been
wearing were neatly stacked on the passenger seat. On top of the clothes was a pencil. A black and white striped pencil sharpened
to a fine point. Nieman picked it up and held it. He put it in his pocket. I might write with this, he decided. Or I might
draw.
He got into his Jeep and drove over to Nora Jane and Freddy Harwood’s house and parked in the driveway and walked up on the
porch and rang the doorbell. The twins let him in. They pulled him into the room. “Momma’s making etouffee and listening to
the Nevilles,” Tammili told him. “She’s having a New Orleans day. Come on in. Stay and eat dinner with us. Daddy said you’d
been in Willits. How is it there? Was it snowing?”
They dragged him into the house. From the back Freddy called out to him. Nora Jane emerged from the kitchen wearing an apron.
It was already beginning to fade. Whatever had happened or almost happened or seemed to happen was fading like a photograph
in acid.
“Come on in here,” Freddy was calling out. “Come tell us what you were doing. We have things to tell you. Tammili made all-stars
in basketball. Lydia got a role in the school play. Nora Jane got an A on her first English test. I think I’m going bald.
We haven’t seen you in days. Hurry up, Nieman. I want to talk to you.”