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THE FOURTH STATE OF MATTER
A week in the author’s life when it became impossible to control the course of events.
By Jo Ann Beard
Their lives were ticking like alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although
none of us were aware of it yet.
The collie wakes me up about three times a night, summoning me from a great
distance as I row my boat through a dim, complicated dream. She’s on the shoreline,
barking. Wake up. She’s staring at me with her head slightly tipped to the side, long nose,
gazing eyes, toenails clenched to get a purchase on the wood floor. We used to call her
the face of love.
T
She totters on her broomstick legs into the hallway and over the doorsill into the
kitchen, makes a sharp left at the refrigerator —careful, almost went down—then a
straightaway to the door. I sleep on my feet in the cold of the doorway, waiting. Here she
comes. Lift her down the two steps. She pees and then stands, Lassie in a ratty coat,
gazing out at the yard.
In the porch light the trees shiver, the squirrels turn over in their sleep. The Milky
Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard. Over the
neighbor’s house, Mars flashes white, then red, then white again. Jupiter is hidden among
the anonymous blinks and glitterings. It has a moon with sulfur-spewing volcanoes and a
beautiful name: Io. I learned it at work, from the group of men who surround me there.
Space physicists, guys who spend days on end with their heads poked through the fabric
of the sky, listening to the sounds of the universe. Guys whose own lives are ticking like
alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although none of us are aware of it yet.
The dog turns and looks, waits to be carried up the two steps. Inside the house she
drops like a shoe onto her blanket, a thud, an adjustment. I’ve climbed back under my
covers already but her leg’s stuck underneath her, we can’t get comfortable. I fix the leg,
she rolls over and sleeps. Two hours later I wake up and she’s gazing at me in the
darkness. The face of love. She wants to go out again. I give her a boost, balance her on
her legs. Right on time: 3:40 a.m.
There are squirrels living in the spare bedroom upstairs. Three dogs also live in this
house, but they were invited. I keep the door of the spare bedroom shut at all times,
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because of the squirrels and because that’s where the vanished husband’s belongings are
stored. Two of the dogs—the smart little brown mutt and the Labrador—spend hours
sitting patiently outside the door, waiting for it to be opened so they can dismantle the
squirrels. The collie can no longer make it up the stairs, so she lies at the bottom and
snores or stares in an interested manner at the furniture around her.
I can take almost anything at this point. For instance, that my vanished husband is
neither here nor there; he’s reduced himself to a troubled voice on the telephone three or
four times a day.
Or that the dog at the bottom of the stairs keeps having mild strokes, which cause her
to tilt her head inquisitively and also to fall over. She drinks prodigious amounts of water
and pees great volumes onto the folded blankets where she sleeps. Each time this
happens I stand her up, dry her off, put fresh blankets underneath her, carry the peed-on
blankets down to the basement, stuff them into the washer and then into the dryer. By the
time I bring them back upstairs they are needed again. The first few times this happened,
I found the dog trying to stand up, gazing with frantic concern at her own rear. I praised
her and patted her head and gave her treats until she settled down. Now I know
whenever it happens, because I hear her tail thumping against the floor in anticipation of
reward. In retraining her I’ve somehow retrained myself, bustling cheerfully down to the
basement, arms drenched in urine, the task of doing load after load of laundry strangely
satisfying. She is Pavlov and I am her dog.
I’m fine about the vanished husband’s boxes stored in the spare bedroom. For now,
the boxes and the phone calls persuade me that things could turn around at any moment.
The boxes are filled with thirteen years of his pack-ratness: statistics textbooks that still
harbor an air of desperation; smarmy suit coats from the Goodwill; various old Halloween
masks and one giant black papier-mâché thing he made that was supposed to be Elvis’s
hair but didn’t turn out. A collection of ancient Rolling Stones T-shirts. You know he’s
turning over a new leaf when he leaves the Rolling Stones behind.
What I can’t take is the squirrels. They come alive at night, throwing terrific parties in
the spare bedroom, making thumps and crashes. Occasionally a high-pitched squeal is
heard amid bumps and the sound of scrabbling toenails. I’ve begun sleeping downstairs,
on the blue vinyl dog couch, the sheets slipping off, my skin stuck to the cushions. This is
an affront to the two younger dogs, who know the couch belongs to them; as soon as I
settle in they creep up and find their places between my knees and elbows.
I’m on the couch because the dog on the blanket gets worried at night. During the day
she sleeps the catnappy sleep of the elderly, but when it gets dark her eyes open and she
is agitated, trying to stand whenever I leave the room, settling down only when I’m next
to her. We are in this together, the dying game, and I read for hours in the evening with
one foot on her back, getting up only to open a new can of beer or take blankets to the
basement. At some point I stretch out on the vinyl couch and close my eyes, one hand
hanging down, touching her side. By morning the dog arm has become a nerveless club
that doesn’t come around until noon. My friends think I’m nuts.
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One night, for hours, the dog won’t lie down. I call my office pal, Mary, and wake her
up. “I’m weary,” I say, in italics.
Mary listens, sympathetic, on the other end. “Oh my God,” she finally says. “What are
you going to do?”
I calm down immediately. “Exactly what I’m doing,” I tell her. The dog finally parks
herself with a thump on the stack of damp blankets. She sets her nose down and tips her
eyes up to watch me. We all sleep then, for a bit, while the squirrels sort through the
boxes overhead and the dog on the blanket keeps nervous watch.
I’ve called in tired to work. It’s mid-morning and I’m shuffling around in my long
underwear, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. The whole house is bathed in
sunlight and the faint odor of used diapers. The dogs are being mild-mannered and
charming; I nudge the collie with my foot.
“Wake up and smell zee bacons,” I say. She lifts her nose groggily and falls back
asleep. I get ready for the office.
“I’m leaving and I’m never coming back,” I say while putting on my coat. I use my
mother’s aggrieved, underappreciated tone. The little brown dog transfers her gaze from
me to the table, the last place she remembers seeing toast. The Labrador, who
understands English, begins howling miserably. She wins the toast sweepstakes and is
chewing loudly when I leave, the little dog barking ferociously at her.
At the office, there are three blinks on the answering machine, the first from a
scientist who speaks very slowly, like a kindergarten teacher, asking about reprints.
“What am I, the village idiot?” I ask the room, taking down his number in large backward
characters. The second and third blinks are from my husband, the across-town apartment
dweller.
The first of his calls makes my heart lurch in a hopeful way. “I have to talk to you
right now,” he says grimly. “Where are you? I can never find you.”
“Try calling your own house,” I say to the machine. In his second message he has
composed himself.
“I’m fine now,” he says firmly. “Disregard previous message and don’t call me back,
please; I have meetings.” Click, dial tone, rewind.
My leaping heart settles back into its hole in my chest. I say “Damn it” out loud, just
as Chris strides into the office.
“What?” he asks defensively. He tries to think if he’s done anything wrong recently.
He checks the table for work; things are in good shape. A graduate student, Gang Lu,
stops by to drop off some reports. Chris and I have a genial relationship these days,
reading the paper together in the mornings, congratulating ourselves on each issue of the
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journal. It’s a space-physics monthly, and he’s the editor and I’m the managing editor. I
know nothing about the science part; my job is to shepherd the manuscripts through the
review process and create a journal out of the acceptable ones.
Christoph Goertz. He’s hip in a professorial, cardigan/jeans kind of way. He’s tall and
lanky and white-haired, forty-seven years old, with an elegant trace of accent from his
native Germany. He has a great dog, a giant black outlaw named Mica, who runs through
the streets of Iowa City at night, inspecting garbage cans. She’s big and friendly but a
bad judge of character, and frequently runs right into the arms of the dogcatcher. Chris is
always bailing her out.
“They don’t understand dogs,” he says.
I spend more time with Chris than I ever did with my husband. The morning I told him
I was being dumped he was genuinely perplexed. “He’s leaving you?” he asked.
Chris was drinking coffee, sitting at his table in front of the blackboard. Behind his
head was a chalk drawing of a hip, professorial man holding a coffee cup. It was a
collaborative effort; I had drawn the man and Chris framed him, using blue chalk and a
straightedge. The two-dimensional man and the three-dimensional man stared at me
intently.
“He’s leaving you?” And for an instant I saw myself from their vantage point across
the room—Jo Ann—and a small bubble of self-esteem percolated up from my depths. Chris
shrugged. “You’ll do fine,” he said.
During my current turmoils I’ve come to think of work as my own kind of Zen
practice, the constant barrage of paper hypnotic and soothing. Chris lets me work an
eccentric schedule; in return I update his publications list for him and listen to stories
about outer space.
Besides being an editor and a teacher, he’s the head of a theoretical-plasma-physics
team made up of graduate students and research scientists. He travels all over the world
telling people about the magnetospheres of various planets, and when he comes back he
brings me presents—a small bronze box from Africa with an alligator embossed on the
top, a big piece of amber from Poland with the wings of flies preserved inside it, and,
once, a set of delicate, horrifying bracelets made from the hide of an elephant.
Currently he is obsessed with the dust in the plasma of Saturn’s rings. Plasma is the
fourth state of matter. You’ve got your solid, your liquid, your gas, and then your plasma.
In outer space there’s the plasmasphere and the plasmapause. I avoid the math when I
can and put a layperson’s spin on these things.
“Plasma is blood,” I told him.
“Exactly,” he agreed, removing the comics page and handing it to me.
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This is the kind of conversation we mostly have around the office, but today he’s
caught me at a weak moment, tucking my heart back inside my chest. I decide to be
cavalier.
“I wish my dog was out tearing up the town and my husband was home sleeping on a
blanket,” I say.
Chris is neutral about my marriage problems, but he thinks the dog thing has gone far
enough. “Why are you letting this go on?” he asks solemnly.
“I’m not letting it, that’s why,” I tell him. There are stacks of manuscripts everywhere
and he has all the pens over on his side of the room. “It just is, is all. Throw me a pen.” He
does, I miss it, stoop to pick it up, and when I straighten up again I might be crying.
“You have control over this,” he explains in his professor voice. “You can decide how
long she suffers.”
This makes my heart pound. Absolutely not, I cannot do it. And then I weaken and say
what I really want: for her to go to sleep and not wake up, just slip out of her skin and into
the other world.
“Exactly,” he says.
I have an ex-beauty queen coming over to get rid of the squirrels for me. She has long
red hair and a smile that can stop trucks. I’ve seen her wrestle goats, scare off a giant
snake, and express a dog’s anal glands, all in one afternoon. I told her on the phone that a
family of squirrels is living in the upstairs of my house.
“They’re making a monkey out of me,” I said.
So Caroline climbs into her car and drives across half the state, pulls up in front of my
house, and gets out carrying zucchini, cigarettes, and a pair of big leather gloves. I’m
sitting outside with my old dog, who lurches to her feet, staggers three steps, sits down,
and falls over. Caroline starts crying.
“Don’t try to give me zucchini,” I say.
We sit companionably on the front stoop for a while, staring at the dog and smoking
cigarettes. One time I went to Caroline’s house and she was nursing a dead cat that was
still breathing. At some point that afternoon, I saw her spoon baby food into its mouth and
as soon as she turned away the whole puréed mess plopped back out. A day later she took
it to the vet and had it euthanized. I remind her of this.
“You’ll do it when you do it,” she says firmly.
I pick the collie up like a fifty-pound bag of sticks and feathers, stagger inside, place
her on the damp blankets, and put the two other nutcases in the back yard. From upstairs
comes a crash and a shriek. Caroline stares up at the ceiling.
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“It’s like having the Wallendas stay at your house,” I say cheerfully. All of a sudden I
feel fond of the squirrels and fond of Caroline and fond of myself for heroically calling her
to help me. The phone rings four times. It’s the husband, and his voice over the
answering machine sounds frantic. He pleads with whoever Jo Ann is to pick up the
phone.
“Please? I think I might be freaking out,” he says. “Am I ruining my life here, or what?
Am I making a mistake? Jo?” He breathes raggedly and sniffs into the receiver for a
moment, then hangs up with a muffled clatter.
Caroline stares at the machine as if it’s a copperhead.
“Holy fuckoly,” she says, shaking her head. “You’re living with this crap?”
“He wants me to reassure him that he’s strong enough to leave me,” I tell her. “Else
he won’t have fun on his bike ride. And guess what? I’m too tired to.” But now I can see
him in his dank little apartment, wringing his hands and staring out the windows. In his
rickety dresser is the new package of condoms he accidentally showed me last week.
Caroline lights another cigarette. The dog pees and thumps her tail.
I need to call him back because he’s suffering.
“You call him back and I’m forced to kill you,” Caroline says. She exhales smoke and
points to the phone. “That is evil shit.”
I tend to agree. It’s blanket time. I roll the collie off onto the floor and put the fresh
blankets down, roll her back. Caroline has put on the leather gloves, which go all the way
to her elbows. She’s staring at the ceiling with determination.
The plan is that I’m supposed to separate one squirrel from the herd and get it in a
corner. Caroline will take it from there. But when I’m in the room with her and the
squirrels are running around, all I can do is scream. I’m not afraid of them, but my
screaming button is 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. I can hear Caroline
crashing around and swearing. The door opens and she falls out into the hall, with a gray
squirrel stuck to her glove. 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. For
an instant she looks like a puppy, then her feet start to slide. I run down and catch her
and carry her upstairs so she can watch the show. The squirrels 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.
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Caroline patches the hole where they got in, cutting the wood with a power saw down
in the basement. She comes up wearing a tool belt 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.
The phone rings again, but whoever it is hangs up.
“Is it him?” she asks.
“Nope.”
Caroline gestures toward the sleeping collie and remarks that it seems like just two
days ago that she was a puppy.
“She was never a puppy,” I tell her. “She’s always been older than me.”
When they say goodbye, Caroline 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 early-evening twilit way. I turn on lights and
go upstairs. The black dog comes with me and circles the squirrel room, snorting loudly,
nose to floor. There is a spot of turmoil in an open box—they made a nest in some 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. We’re all smoking semi-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 Smith says condescendingly. A stocky,
short-tempered man, he’s smoking a horrendously smelly pipe. The longer he stays in
here the more it feels as if 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
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hissing match in the hallway which ended with him suggesting that I could be fired,
which drove me to tell him that 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. Bob is his best friend. They spend at least half of each day standing
in front of blackboards, 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, the doctoral student. 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, Linhua 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 can make my usual
midafternoon spate of personal calls. I begin thumbing through papers in a businesslike
way.
Bob pokes at his pipe with a paper clip. Linhua 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 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 as if 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
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spends his evenings in the computer lab down the hall, 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.
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 was
looking for me, or what. But when I was at work she used her long nose like a lever and
got the door 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 and petted her. We used to
play a game called Maserati, where I’d grab her long 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.
Friday, I’m at work, but this morning there’s not much to do, and every time I turn
around I see her sprawled, eyes mute, leg bent upward. We’re breaking each other’s
heart. 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?” This sounds perfectly reasonable to him. He
gives me part of the paper.
His mother is visiting from Germany; she’s 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 can’t be really 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.
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
Chris watching me, drinking his coffee. His long legs are crossed, his eyes are mild. He
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has a wife named Ulrike, a daughter named Karein, and a son named Göran. 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, 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 travelling companions to accompany me to
the grave. Inside the coat on the back of his chair are a .38-calibre handgun and a
.22-calibre revolver. They’re heavier than they look and weigh the pockets down. My
beloved second 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 at the head
of the long table explains something unexplainable. Gang Lu stands up and leaves the
room abruptly; goes down one floor to see if the department chairman, Dwight, is sitting
in his office. He is. The door is open. Gang Lu turns, walks back up the stairs, and enters
the seminar 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. Linhua 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.
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Gang Lu walks quickly down the stairs, expelling 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 to him—Bob Smith, hit in the chest, hit in the hand, still alive. Back up the
stairs. Two scientists, young men, crouch 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 Linhua Shan. Exit the building, cross two
streets and the green, into the second building and up the stairs.
The administrator, Anne Cleary, is summoned from her office by the receptionist. She
speaks to him for a few minutes, 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. He expels 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 conference room, takes off his coat,
folds it carefully, and puts it over the back of a chair. Checks his watch: twelve minutes
since it began. Places the barrel against his right temple. Fires.
The first call comes at four o’clock. I’m reading on the bench in the kitchen, one foot
on a sleeping dog’s back. It’s Mary, calling from work. There’s been some kind of
disturbance in the building, a rumor that Dwight was shot; cops are running through the
halls carrying rifles. They’re evacuating the building and she’s coming over. Dwight, a tall
likable oddball who cut off his ponytail when they made him chair of the department.
Greets everyone with a famous booming hello in the morning; studies plasma, just like
Chris and Bob. Chris lives two and a half blocks from the physics building; he’ll be home
by now if they’ve evacuated. I dial his house and his mother answers. She tells me that
Chris won’t be home until five, and then they’re going to a play. Ulrike, her
daughter-in-law, is coming back from a trip to Chicago and will join them. She wants to
know why I’m looking for Chris—isn’t he where I am?
No, I’m at home and I just had to ask him something. Could he please call me when he
comes in.
She tells me that Chris showed her a drawing I made of him sitting at his desk behind
a stack of manuscripts. She’s so pleased to meet Chris’s friends, and the Midwest is
lovely, really, except it’s very brown, isn’t it?
It is very brown. We hang up.
The Midwest is very brown. The phone rings. It’s a physicist. His wife, a friend of
mine, is on the extension. Well, he’s not sure, but it’s possible that I should brace myself
for bad news. I’ve already heard, I tell him—something happened to Dwight. There’s a
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long pause, and then his wife says, “Jo Ann. It’s possible that Chris was involved.”
I think she means Chris shot Dwight. “No,” she says gently. “Killed, too.”
Mary is here. I tell them not to worry and hang up. I have two cigarettes going. Mary
takes one and smokes it. She’s not looking at me. I tell her about the phone call.
“They’re out of it,” I say. “They thought Chris was involved.”
She repeats what they said: “I think you should brace yourself for bad news.” Pours
whiskey into a coffee cup.
For a few minutes I can’t sit down, I can’t stand up. I can only smoke. The phone
rings. Another physicist tells me there’s some bad news. He mentions Chris and Bob and I
tell him I don’t want to talk right now. He says O.K. but to be prepared because it’s going
to be on the news any minute. It’s four-forty-five.
“Now they’re trying to stir Bob into the stew,” I tell Mary. She nods; she’s heard this,
too. I have the distinct feeling there is something going on that I can either understand or
not understand. There’s a choice to be made.
“I don’t understand,” I tell Mary.
We sit in the darkening living room, smoking and sipping our cups of whiskey. Inside
my head I keep thinking, Uh-oh, over and over. I’m rattled; I can’t calm down and figure
this out.
“I think we should brace ourselves in case something bad has happened,” I say to
Mary. She nods. “Just in case. It won’t hurt to be braced.” I realize that I don’t know what
“braced” means. You hear it all the time but that doesn’t mean it makes sense. Whiskey is
supposed to be bracing but what it is is awful. I want either tea or beer, no whiskey. Mary
nods again and heads into the kitchen.
Within an hour there are seven women in the dim living room, sitting. Switching back
and forth between CNN and the local news reports. There is something terrifying about
the quality of the light and the way voices are echoing in the room. The phone never stops
ringing, ever since the story hit the national news. Physics, University of Iowa, dead
people. Names not yet released. Everyone I’ve ever known is checking in to see if I’m still
alive. California calls, New York calls, Florida calls, Ohio calls twice. My husband is
having a party and all his guests call, one after another, to ask how I’m doing. Each time,
fifty times, I think it might be Chris and then it isn’t.
It occurs to me once that I could call his house and talk to him directly, find out
exactly what happened. Fear that his mother would answer prevents me from doing it. By
this time I am getting reconciled to the fact that Linhua Shan, Gang Lu, and Dwight
Nicholson were killed. Also an administrator and her office assistant. The Channel 9
newswoman keeps saying there are five dead and two in critical condition. The names will
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be released at nine o’clock. Eventually I sacrifice all of them except Chris and Bob; they
are the ones in critical condition, which is certainly not hopeless. At some point I go into
the study to get away from the terrible dimness in the living room—all those eyes, all that
calmness in the face of chaos. The collie tries to stand up, but someone stops her with a
handful of Fritos.
The study is small and cold after I shut the door, but more brightly lit than the living
room. I can’t remember what anything means. The phone rings and I pick up the
extension and listen. My friend Michael is calling from Illinois for the second time. He
asks Shirley if I’m holding up O.K. Shirley says it’s hard to tell. I go back into the living
room.
The newswoman breaks in at nine o’clock, and of course they drag it out as long as
they can. I’ve already figured out that if they go in alphabetical order Chris will come
first: Goertz, Lu, Nicholson, Shan, Smith. His name will come on first. She drones on,
dead University of Iowa professors, lone gunman named Gang Lu.
Gang Lu. Lone gunman. Before I have a chance to absorb that, she says, The dead
are.
Chris’s picture.
Oh no, oh God. I lean against Mary’s chair and then leave the room abruptly. I have to
stand in the bathroom for a while and look at myself in the mirror. I’m still Jo Ann, white
face and dark hair. I have earrings on, tiny wrenches that hang from wires. In the living
room she’s pronouncing all the other names. The two critically wounded are the
administrator and her assistant, Miya Rodolfo- Sioson. The administrator is already dead
for all practical purposes, although they won’t disconnect the machines until the
following afternoon. The student receptionist will survive but will never again be able to
move much more than her head. She was in Gang Lu’s path and he shot her and the bullet
lodged in the top of her spine and she will never dance or walk or spend a day alone. She
got to keep her head but lost her body. The final victim is Chris’s mother, who will
weather it all with a dignified face and an erect spine, then return to Germany and kill
herself without further words or fanfare.
I tell the white face in the mirror that Gang Lu did this, wrecked everything and
murdered all those people. It seems as ludicrous as everything else. I can’t get my mind
to work right, I’m still operating on yesterday’s facts; today hasn’t jelled yet. “It’s a good
thing none of this happened,” I say to my face. A knock on the door, and I open it.
Julene’s hesitant face. “She wanted to come visit you,” she tells me. I bring the collie
in and close the door. We sit by the tub. She lifts her long nose to my face and I take her
muzzle and we move through the gears slowly—first second third fourth—all the way
through town, until what happened has happened and we know it has happened. We
return to the living room. The second wave of calls is starting to come in, from people
who just saw the faces on the news. Shirley screens. A knock comes on the door. Julene
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settles the dog down again on her blanket. It’s the husband at the door, looking
distraught. He hugs me hard, but I’m made of cement, arms stuck in a down position.
The women immediately clear out, taking their leave, looking at the floor. Suddenly
it’s only me and him, sitting in our living room on a Friday night, just like always. I realize
it took courage for him to come to the house when he did, facing all those women who
think he’s the Antichrist. The dogs are crowded against him on the couch and he’s
wearing a shirt I’ve never seen before. He’s here to help me
I get through this. Me. He knows how awful this must be. Awful. He knows how I felt
about Chris. Past tense. I have to put my hands over my face for a minute.
We sit silently in our living room. He watches the mute television screen and I watch
him. The planes and ridges of his face are more familiar to me than my own. I understand
that he wishes even more than I do that he still loved me. When he looks over at me, it’s
with an expression I’ve seen before. It’s the way he looks at the dog on the blanket.
I get his coat and follow him out into the cold November night. There are stars and
stars and stars. The sky is full of dead men, drifting in the blackness like helium balloons.
My mother floats past in a hospital gown, trailing tubes. I go back inside where the heat
is.
The house is empty and dim, full of dogs and cigarette butts. The collie has peed
again. The television is flickering “Special Report” across the screen and I turn it off
before the pictures appear. I bring blankets up, fresh and warm from the dryer.
After all the commotion the living room feels cavernous and dead. A branch scrapes
against the house, and for a brief instant I feel a surge of hope. They might have come
back. And I stand at the foot of the stairs staring up into the darkness, listening for the
sounds of their little squirrel feet. Silence. No matter how much you miss them. They
never come back once they’re gone. wake her up three times between midnight and
dawn. She doesn’t usually sleep this soundly, but all the chaos and company in the house
tonight have made her more tired than usual. The Lab wakes and drowsily begins licking
her lower region. She stops and stares at me, trying to make out my face in the dark, then
gives up and sleeps. The brown dog is flat on her back with her paws limp, wedged
between me and the back of the couch.
I’ve propped myself so I’ll be able to see when dawn starts to arrive. For now there
are still planets and stars. Above the black branches of a maple is the Dog Star, Sirius, my
personal favorite. The dusty rings of Saturn. Io, Jupiter’s moon.
When I think I can’t bear it for one more minute I reach down and nudge her gently
with my dog arm. She rises slowly, faltering, and stands over me in the darkness. My
peer, my colleague. In a few hours the world will resume itself, but for now we’re in a
pocket of silence. We’re in the plasmapause, a place of equilibrium, where the forces of
the earth meet the forces of the sun. I imagine it as a place of stillness, where the
15
particles of dust stop spinning and hang motionless in deep space.
Around my neck is the stone he brought me from Poland. I hold it out. Like this? I ask.
Shards of fly wings, suspended in amber.
Exactly, he says. ♦