How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe - By Charles Yu Page 0,11
with each passing year.
“It’s not fair,” my mom would say, setting his dinner on the table, trying to console him with a hand on his back. He’d flinch from her touch or, worse, pretend she wasn’t there. We would all sit and eat in silence, and then my mother would go to her separate bedroom to read herself to sleep.
He kept index cards, three inches by five, in a metal box. They started as a kind of engineer’s Rolodex: sparse, efficient, joyless. On each card, on the top red line, was a person’s name, a friend or an acquaintance or a colleague, in his tight, clear, unerring hybrid of print and script. Underneath it, in the blue lines of the rest of the card, was written a phone number, and an address if he had one, and over to the right, some note on his relationship to, or the noteworthiness of, the person.
As a kid, I saw those cards as the beginning of something. I saw their ordered state, their formality, each one representing a connection to some outside mind, to other scientists. I saw that metal box as a treasure chest.
Looking back now, I realize how few cards there were, how carefully each one was written, I understand that this level of care was due to how sparse the contacts were, that the amount of time spent on each card was inversely proportional to the amount of connection my father actually had to the outside world.
I remember him sitting by the phone, his small, compact frame tense with anticipation, waiting there for a call that would be a big deal to him, a slight courtesy for the caller.
“I think the phone rang when you were out earlier,” I would say sometimes.
“You didn’t get it?”
“Just missed it.”
“No message on the machine.”
“I’m sure they’ll call back.”
The books in his study, with their rigid cloth spines and their impenetrable titles, they seemed daunting and impossible back then, but now, thinking back, I can see how the books were all related, I can see how they were, collectively, a bibliography of a career in striving, in aiming, in seeking to understand the world. My father searched for systems of thought, for patterns, rules, even instructions. Fake religions, real religions. How-to books. Turn Three Thousand into Half a Million. Turn half a million into ten. Conquer Your Weaknesses. Conquer yourself. Inventory of Your Soul. Take an inventory of your own failings. Higher mathematics and properties of materials, somber, gray monographs on single, esoteric subjects were side by side with books with bright red titles, titles dripping with superlatives, with promises of actualization, realization, books that diagrammed the self as a fixable lemon, self as a challenge in mechanics, self as an exercise in bullet points, self as a collection of traits to be altered, self as a DIY project. Self as a kind of problem to be solved.
When waiting by the phone got to be too much, he used to go to his room, change his clothes, and head down to the garage. I would wait a few minutes and head down there, stand near him, watch him tinker. If he couldn’t figure something out, he’d go to the hardware store, leaving me there to dribble a mostly flat basketball until he came back. Sometimes he didn’t come back for hours. When he did fix something, he would explain it to me, step by step. He was never happier than when he could walk me through a problem, from beginning to end, knowing at each juncture what the next step would be. I asked questions until I couldn’t think of any more, and when we’d exhausted the subject, we’d head back upstairs, wash up, sink ourselves into the couch in front of the TV.
“What are we watching?” I would ask.
“Not sure. I think it’s news from another world.”
We’d watch in happy, tired silence. Mom would bring cut cubes of watermelon, pierced with toothpicks, and the three of us would press them into our mouths, drinking the cold juice.
“How is school?” my dad would say.
“Good, I guess.”
“Tell me about it.”
I would tell him about it, then we’d fall back into silence. After a while, he would lean back, close his eyes, smile.
“What do you think . . . ”
A long pause.
“Dad?”
My mom would raise the back of her hand to her cheek. Sleeping, she would mouth at me.
Then all of a sudden: “Son.” He’d snorted himself awake.