How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe - By Charles Yu Page 0,57

life that way, as a series of mostly bummer days with the occasional chance at getting a win against life. Who thinks that way? I was seventeen. Who thinks that way at seventeen?

They set up about fifty feet away from each other, two endpoints of a little father–son axis, and the dad began lobbing slow overhand pitches to his son, and the boy would swing at them, hitting about one out of every six or seven, weak little grounders that dribbled back to his dad, that his dad would run up to and field as if they were hard hit, which made his son feel a little better, but also a lot worse. The kid was small, and I had been a small kid, and I remember what it was like. He looked like he was getting frustrated. He didn’t have any bat speed, even for a kid his age. The bat was probably about three ounces too heavy.

But then, after about three dozen pitches and four or five dinky glancing hits, the kid got ahold of one. The sound it made. It was a perfect sound. Crack. Clean off the sweet spot. Even as he was hitting it, I don’t think he believed it was happening. I remember thinking how much I wanted that to be my father–son axis, how bad I wanted to be the one hitting that ball.

The kid’s dad whipped his head around, as did all of the other kids, and their dads, and even the director. Everyone stopped and turned and watched the ball fly over his dad’s head and then over the grass of the adjoining field, and then over the infield, and land, right on home plate of the other diamond. The kid had arms like wet noodles, didn’t even really have shoulders yet. It had to have been 250 feet. I saw it happen and I’m seeing it again now and I still don’t believe it happened.

The only person who hadn’t watched it was my dad. I didn’t know that then, but now, I see that. He just stands there, looking at our sad prototype, holding a vacuum tube in one hand and his other hand on his head, and looking like he knows it just slipped away. The director turns back from watching the kid, which was just the break he needed to stop my dad’s awkward fumbling with the machine. There was a mumbled half apology about needing to get back to the office for a meeting, and a promise of perhaps continuing this at a later date which I now see as a courteous refusal of the director to acknowledge what had happened, but even then I knew, given me, given our family, that this was it, that there wouldn’t be another chance, that this was the high point of our arc and from here, we were heading into unknown territory.

The fallout started the next morning. It must have taken a night for it to process, a few hours spent alone, stewing over it, replaying the memory over and over in his head, asking what if. It must have taken that time for the damage to register on his ego, on his shell, on his sense of purpose and navigation, on his physical body, even. He didn’t get out of bed until ten, which was very late for him, about four and a half hours late for a Sunday morning, and when I saw him he looked sore, like he’d aged years in one night. My mother went to temple early and I was left in the house to wonder when he would get up and what it would be like when he did. He went into the bathroom and after a long shower and a long period of silence before and after, he emerged from there and walked into the kitchen just after noon. He didn’t look at me, didn’t ask where Mom was. We sat and ate noodles that she had cooked and left on the stove. He heated his up and then picked at them looking mildly repulsed. I asked him if he wanted me to heat up some soup. He didn’t answer. After he ate, he put his plate in the sink and I heard him go down into the garage and I was thinking, just for a second, what if, and I was about to go join him when I heard the garage open and his car rumble out the driveway. He didn’t come