The first section of my masters thesis project, "Love, Death, and Other Quantum Entanglements."
Prologue: Relativity
Li-Peng Jingwei– Nanking, China
(December 25, 1968-the day before Mao’s birthday)
Peng watched the group of children running around the courtyard, with the smallest boy waving his arms and moving slowly, growling every now and then, pretending to be a monster chasing the others for his meal. It was an odd way to play the game, he thought, not very likely that a lumbering creature would ever catch any of the children who taunted him. A girl silently got behind the little boy and tapped him on his back, and he whirled, making a guttural noise that caused her to squeal in delight as she receded. His attention diverted by the rear attack, a larger boy ran up and slapped the monster on his knee, with the same result: the boy turned and growled, and the big boy screamed in mock horror and fled. This pattern repeated itself for half an hour, with the small boy never catching a single tormenting child, as they dive-bombed him like a band of bluejays. Peng wondered why the boy didn’t break character and sprint to tag another child, so he would win and be freed from playing such a powerless, hobbled creature.
Finally, the large boy timed one of his attacks poorly, so that just when he went to slap the monster’s shoulder, he was already turning around, and the boy tripped over his own feet and went down after only one step. The monster staggered over him, inexorably moving what must have been imaginary claws toward the cowering boy, broad grins on their faces as each played their role in ending the sport. It was the perfect game for the small boy: by playing the sun in that heliocentric system, he was the focus of the others’ attentions, even if it was their fear and aggression. Maybe the boy liked the touching and running away, the children testing speed against fear, little toreadors pricking a make-believe bull, a ritual test of courage, but perhaps also one of community. Peng realized that the same game was being played throughout China every day, packs of citizens alternately joining and betraying each other, trying to survive the purges that could reduce the powerful to a pariah with a few words from the wrong person. His caution in all things, which his wife Wen chafed under and mocked, had kept them safe these last years. If they could maintain that vigilance for three more days, it would be worth all the sacrifice and cowering, and they would be free of this cauldron of ignorance about to boil over.
Peng was pleased to see that none of the children played in the far back corner of the courtyard, which had grown thick with weeds, now tilting brown tassels sucked dry and colorless by the weak winter sun, a melancholy collage of dead grass, gray rock, mud and shadow. He inhaled deeply, savoring that crisp scent of charred wood that made you think someone was burning leaves nearby, but he knew was the scent of gradual decomposition. Peng’s grandfather had taught him how to build a tight layer of rotting leaves on the roof and pile more against the walls of his ancient hut each fall, the extra heat of decay critical in a region where wood was scarce. For his grandfather, it was a rural tradition, but his curious grandson would learn the formula for the chemical reaction in his first-year chemistry class. When Peng proudly explained the process to the old man, scrawling the equation on the dirt floor, his grandfather laughed and exclaimed “so now you are a sorcerer!” The fading daylight of fall and winter, along with the attendant smells of the seasons, made him nostalgic, another forbidden emotion in a nation obsessed with great leaps forward.
The shady corner of the courtyard had been his favorite spot as a young boy—it practically exploded with flowers, tiered in a series of miniature terraces, so the lilies towered over the marigolds, which oversaw the chrysanthemums, all of them below a row of sunflowers. Back then, a small shrine sat in the corner with a plump Buddha atop a cement pedestal, the perfect symbol of his family’s satisfaction and contentment in their lavish home. It had been destroyed years ago—Buddhism was a seductive opiate that dulled the masses to injustice. Even the concrete pedestal was gone, most likely crushed into gravel for use in a new “people’s road” or seized to decorate the garden of a party official, an amusing reminder of the misguided piety of the masses.
The lack of activity in that corner meant that he could dig there without interruption, but his very presence there would also look more out of place, and therefore suspicious. In this China, any deviation from the norm was assumed to be a condemnation of egalitarianism, and by extension, the proletariat. Uniformity was patriotic, and anything that set one apart was an endorsement of capitalist exceptionalism, and therefore reactionary and counter-revolutionary, the worst possible crime. Peng knew that neither he nor Wen could survive the re-education camps, especially with her pregnant; the only lessons taught there were how to starve and endure torture. He could not afford to draw attention to himself without having an airtight explanation for his actions.
Before the revolution, this apartment complex of open-air rooms had been his family’s home. Peng had taken great precautions against this being discovered, using his second name instead of the traditional first. He did not return to this neighborhood until last year, avoiding anyone who might recognize remnants of a young boy’s smile in the young man’s grimace. He changed his hair dramatically by shaving it almost to the scalp. He had even taken a knife and carved from the top of his right cheekbone down to the cleft of his chin—sometimes he had nightmares where he relived the act, the warm trickle of blood diagonally down his face more jarring than the cut of the knife. He explained the scar in a dramatic story where he was slashed by a wealthy shopkeeper—even Peng’s lies were dictated by party doctrine.
It took him three years of slow maneuvers to return here—favors, bureaucratic ploys, trading black market goods, even outright bribes. Finally, he was back at the house where he’d been born, and which held his and Wen’s only means of freedom. Peng’s father had been the official printer for the provincial governor, so he would throw extravagant parties for the ministers and department heads who paid him so well for his services, and in turn who he bribed generously. They jokingly called him “The Paper Wizard” because of his ability to place words and images onto paper better and more cheaply than anyone else. Peng could almost see his mother in a long silk gown, filling champagne flutes as she flitted around the courtyard, tiled in marble imported from Italy. Those tiles had been “repatriated by the proletariat,” more than a decade ago, and that should have been a sign to his parents.
But his parents’ stubbornness was as unyielding as the heavy silk they continued to wear, and when they were finally arrested and sent away for re-education, his last sight of his mother was in a tattered tunic that was so covered in grime that he almost didn’t recognize it as her sleeping gown—they must have taken them at night.
Peng was lucky not to join them in jail, but he was away at university, or at least the small section of the school that continued to function despite the unrest and daily denunciations. The engineers at the school had convinced the mobs of young revolutionaries that they were not intellectuals, but rather simple workers, whose work was critical to keeping the city’s function. This perceived status kept them largely immune to harassment, so long as the water and electricity flowed.
He met Wen when she worked as a receptionist in the office next to the physics lab. Ordinarily, a science lab would be an oasis for a pretty girl who wanted to be left alone to read, the other denizens being socially awkward scientists immersed in their work. Peng was bold by his colleagues’ standards, having the temerity to chat with the pensive beauty and even ask her to tea. Not out for a real “date,” for dating was an outdated and decadent Western practice, but a meeting to discuss their roles in the ongoing revolution. Peng knew he’d found a kindred soul when in her absence he opened one of the treatises on communist doctrine she was always poring over, and discovered poems by Du Fu and Li Bo slipped between its pages.
They had gone for tea at one of the few small cafes still open in the city, but a few days later, he came down with an illness that sent him to the hospital—within hours, he was barely conscious. The doctor suspected one of the diseases that swept through Nanking during that time of civic instability, so Peng sat in quarantine for a week. By the time his fever broke and ended his delirium, he awoke to a new one: the university was burning, his parents had been arrested, and their house seized and made into group housing. Peng found himself a highly educated, twenty-six-year-old son of class traitors. It was a death sentence worse than cholera or influenza.
His reverie of his parents was broken as their coal-black cat brushed against his shoulder. Wen had named her Ash, but he hated naming animals, as it suggested a sentimentality that was inappropriate during such difficult times. Pets were disfavored as an extravagance under the best conditions and on the same level of rats in the worst—how can one justify feeding scraps to animals when people go hungry? Cats and dogs were just another tapped-out food source in times of starvation, like the brutal Japanese occupation during World War II or the famines that swept through rural areas whose crops failed. Luckily, Ash had earned her keep: she was an excellent predator of vermin that could steal a day’s bread in an instant. The children had come to love Ash, despite an aloofness that was typical of the species, and even Wen’s crankiest neighbors were glad to have her patrol the grounds; their building might have been one of the only rat-free sites in the city. She’d become the building’s unofficial mascot, with some people stopping by just to see Ash. Peng tried not to ponder the insanity of a society where a cat had become more valued than a man with a PhD in plasma physics.
Ash purred as he stroked under her chin, and Peng calmed as much as she did. He concentrated on how he could dig in that corner without arousing attention. He had just three more days to act, and tomorrow would be hectic, with all the celebrations and noise of the Chairman’s birthday—that might provide him some cover. The rhythm of his strokes made Ash’s purring louder, until Peng froze, realizing that he literally held the answer to their problems in his hands.
* * * * *
Cecile Claire Sampson – Nashville, Tennessee
(November 11, 1981-Veterans Day)
She was sulking, again. Kevin hoped her pouting had been ignited by another case of someone telling her she couldn’t do something, his daughter’s ego being triggered by yet another barrier that made no sense to her, or him, for that matter. But Cecile was almost thirteen, so he feared that this might be the day that his daughter’s attention finally turned to boys, and his job as a single father would become immeasurably more miserable. He thought that he’d been doing a good job as a dad since Dolores died four years ago, but he dreaded the advent of adolescence, where a hug and unflagging support was not enough to deal with the problems of cascading hormones, changing bodies, and peer pressure.
Cecile was as much a late bloomer physically as she was an early one intellectually, the two combined to make it especially hard to fit in at school. It was fortunate that he and Dolores had passed their over-six-foot height on to her; she was always the tallest kid in her classes, even with puberty not having started yet. Cecile’s athleticism and confrontational nature meant that the taunts never got physical, but words could be more invidious than a punch, and she hadn’t learned how to dodge their sting; hell, neither had he.
Kevin was less combative than his energetic daughter, and over the years learned to avoid circles where he was unwelcome before they could ostracize him. He gradually found people he liked spending time with and felt the same of him, but he didn’t really hit his stride until college. High school wasn’t an agony, but he’d survived primarily by keeping his head down as much as possible, knowing that college meant he could recreate himself any way he wanted. Somewhere in the attic was the cardboard box of yearbooks, school pictures, photo albums, and science fair trophies that he packed up the morning after graduation. He never opened it since.
Hearing drawers being slammed open and shut, Kevin cautiously drew open the door. Her bedroom was a study in contrasts, a menagerie of stuffed animals sailing a sea of pink bedding and pillows, surrounded by posters of Bob Gibson, Dr. J, Heart, and Marie Curie, books and soccer cleats littering the floor. “What’s wrong, sweetie?”
His lanky whirlwind of a daughter stomped around the room. “My teacher told me that I couldn’t be an army general. He said that I could stay home and take care of babies while the men got to be soldiers!” Cecile sat on the bed and hurriedly tied her bright purple sneakers.
“I didn’t know that you wanted to be a soldier, honey.” Kevin was used to her changing what she wanted to be when she grew up, but the military was a new one. “It’s a terrible job and you’d be away from home a lot, I hope you really don’t want to be in the army. I thought you wanted to be an airline pilot.” Cecile talked his ear off about flying after they flew on a jet to Disneyland last summer.
“I don’t know if I want to be in the army, not for sure, but if I decide later to, why can’t I? And why do I have to take care of babies? That’s boring.” Cecile drooped her head to her chest and pretended to snore loudly.
He had been down this road before. “Honey, whatever you want to do, I will be there to back you up. Say the word and I’ll go down to that school and yell at your teacher until his ears burn off.” She stopped pretending to sleep and cracked a smile at him.
“That’s okay, don’t bother. I just hate how so much of school is telling you what to do and think. Isn’t school supposed to be where we learn lots of information so we can pursue our dreams?” she asked.
“It sure is. If you want to be a general, or a pilot, that’s what you’ll be,” he said. “You know I will always support you.”
Cecile perked up. “I don’t want to be either of those things. I want to be an artist, probably a painter, or if not, perhaps a scientist. Maybe even a chemist, like you.”
Kevin laughed at her unintentional humor. “Or you can be all three, like me, and become a chemist at a paint factory.”
Cecile wrinkled her nose. “Daddy, you know I love you, but I don’t want to do that. It sounds even more boring than having babies.”
He was stung by how easily his daughter could see how unfulfilled he was at work, but having been offered an opportunity to avoid the entire topic of having babies, Kevin grabbed it. “You’re right, my job is pretty boring, but I get lots of time with you. I never have emergencies that make me stay late at work, and we have every weekend off to go and do fun stuff.” Once the words left his mouth, Kevin realized that he had summed up the years since his wife’s death perfectly: he had traded his ambition and any prospect of professional fulfillment for time with his daughter. “Bring your baseball glove, we can go to the fields for some batting practice before it gets dark. Then we can go try that new restaurant—get this, it’s Mexican food. We’ve never had that before.”
Cecile grabbed her ball cap and glove and ran downstairs ahead of him. “What on earth do they eat in Mexico, daddy?”
He was proud of this eagerness. Dolores had resisted Cecile’s early pickiness over food, even as a baby, arguing that a child who wasn’t open to new food wouldn’t be open to new ideas either. “I don’t know exactly, but I hear it’s spicy.”
Cecile warned him, “I’ll try it, but if it’s gross, I can get a hamburger, right?” This was their standard deal, but one that he rarely had to honor.
“Of course.” As they headed to the car, Kevin worried about how aware she was that he hated his work. Perhaps as much as he was helping her by spending time with her after her mother’s death, he was also hurting her by not being a better example, professionally.
When he’d left the PhD program at Vanderbilt and taken the position at the factory in quality control three years ago, his colleagues tried to talk him out of it. Gently, of course, since nobody wants to argue with a grieving father. His mentor even offered Kevin a “secret leave of absence” where he’d keep paying him as long as he kept working in the lab—no classes to teach, no pressure to publish, just continue his research. But there was no joy in the work anymore. How could he feel any accomplishment when he couldn’t come home and tell Dolores about it? How he had figured out a molecule’s structure or managed to create another precursor molecule that brought them one step closer to building a complex protein? For all the praise he got from his colleagues and professors about being a golden boy, a scientific genius, what did it matter that he was so skillful at synthesizing chemicals, when he couldn’t make one to kill the cancer that slowly gnawed Dolores into oblivion?
* * * * *
Theodore Kent Riggins – Taos, New Mexico
(October 10, 1977-Columbus Day)
Margot held his hand as they walked, at almost a shuffle, barely lifting their feet so any surprise obstacle—a prairie dog hole or the thick roots of a desert sage bush—wouldn’t make them stumble. What was the point of strolling through the desert at midnight if you spend all your time looking at the ground? She’d brought a blanket for when they found the perfect spot, behind some boulder of rock face that would block the residual light from the town and highway. The crags in the distance looked about mile away, meaning that it was at least two. In no hurry, she just enjoyed the gentle sway of her legs, the whisper of their feet shushing away sand, it was so nice to walk slowly, without urgency or purpose, instead of rushing to clear dishes and top off coffees. The best part was the eager clenching of his hand around her fingers. Better cherish these moments, she thought, he won’t be this small or affectionate forever.
She glanced down at her son, his neck locked in intense concentration, oblivious to where he walked. He was entirely dependent on her to steer him about the occasional rock or rodent hole or scrub bush, as his eyes and head swept like a World War II searchlight, scanning the array of stars sprawling for incoming meteors or comets. Margot felt sorry for city folks who only knew of the Milky Way as a candy bar. Out here, it was a real thing, a speckled aurora that filled the sky like the gleaming exhaust from Apollo’s blazing chariot. Even after living in New Mexico for months, and having taken dozens of walks like this, the stars always astonished her, the grandeur and complexity of the heavens, each miniscule speck of light and raging furnace billions of miles distant; perhaps some alien parent on a distant world was walking with their child, looking a thousand light-years back at them and wondering if they were the only intelligent life that this vast universe had spawned.
She viewed Teddie as a similar miracle, if not proof of a loving god, at least evidence of an imaginative one. Her son made her laugh every day, by something he’d ask, or the face of pure wonder when he saw something for the first time, or just the way he would sleep sometimes, every muscle in his face relaxed, as innocent and calm as a Michelangelo pietá. He was so smart, her seven-year-old, that Margot started reading books simply to be able to keep pace with his questions, a barrage that never stopped and that she never wanted to stop. His curiosity wasn’t that “but why, mommy?” torture she’d seen some kids inflict upon their parents, but so sincere and insightful.
This afternoon, she’d pored over a book of constellations so she could trace out the outlines of the imaginary figures for Teddie. Exposed now to the majesty of the heavens, undiluted by obscuring lights, it was impossible to separate the bright stars that the Greeks and Romans had connected to form their religious pantheon. She was only certain of the Great Bear and its inverted doppelganger, the Big Dipper, along with the North Star, Polaris, the central point around which the entire sky rotated.
They were far enough away that the lingering diesel and rubber aroma of the highway had dissipated, replaced with a moist, almost pine scent. There were no trees for miles, only a sporadic cactus maybe a few feet tall, and the gray-green scrub bush that never reached above knee-level, but whose meandering branches sprawled sideways, collecting the blown sand into mini-dunes like outstretched arms hugging the earth. She found a nice flat area flanked by this scrub, down a gentle slope, so the town’s residual light was hidden behind the horizon. Once their eyes adjusted, a rich band of stars slathered overheard, so bright their light painted the ground like a streetlight.
She laid out their bedsheet with a sharp snap of her wrists, sending a rippling wave down the length of its tattered cotton. She found four fist-sized rocks to anchor the corners, and they lay on their backs to enjoy the light show. “That’s Orion,” Margot said, tracing with her finger the imaginary outline of a triumphant hunter holding pelts aloft. “That stretch of stars is his belt, and the bright one is called Betelgeuse, although it’s spelled different and pronounced ‘beetle juice.’” She tried to help Teddie with his pronunciations because he encountered so many foreign words in his above-grade-level reading that he often mispronounced them. It was so unfair—how is a seven-year-old supposed to know that the P is silent in “pseudonym” or that the “g is spoken in “agnostic” but silent in “gnostic”? It was hard enough for him being smaller than his classmates, due to him skipping first and fourth grade, without handing the bullies ammunition to mock him.
“I read that Betelgeuse is a red giant star, which is what our Sun is going to become in millions of years when it expands,” and Teddie threw his hands apart to demonstrate an explosion. “It’s also more than sixty light years away—that means that the light that we are seeing right now is actually sixty years old.”
“So if there was a mom and her son sitting on a planet near Betelgeuse looking at us, they’d see whatever was happening in 1917 down here?” she asked.
“Yep. I guess if they had super-vision, they could see grandma and grandpa, doing whatever they were doing back then.” The second the words left her mouth, she regretted them, and braced herself for the inevitable questions.
Without turning her head, she could feel Teddie’s face turning towards her as he asked, “How come we don’t see grandma and grandpa anymore?” The way his typically matter-of-fact voice trailed off made clear he wasn’t happy with the situation.
“Well, those were your daddy’s parents, and when he and I went our separate ways, so did they,” she explained. “I’m really sorry about that, but there was nothing that I could do.” She loved Robert’s parents, whose kindness meant so much to her when they were first married and she was all alone. But that same soft-heartedness meant that they’d never be able to keep her present location a secret from their son, whose violence and drinking confused them, as they had never indulged in either. Robert had made clear that Teddie was his son, even calling their boy “my property,” and she had no doubt that he’d treat him just as poorly as the parade of abandoned cars and unrepaired boats that littered his driveways over the years. The only things Robert was ever able to complete was to finish a bottle and a war, and when each one ended, he went looking for another. She sometimes wondered what he has doing now that Vietnam was long gone. But she was never curious enough to make any inquiries, because that’s how lost people get found.
“I sure miss them.” Although Teddie was only four when they took off, she was sure that his near-perfect memory contained many detailed recollections of the couple.
“Maybe one day I can try to find them again. Later, much later.” She regretted saying this too, because kids don’t understand that people throw around empty words as polite reassurances, saying whatever is convenient to get through to the next day. She knew that until she was certain Robert was dead or Teddie was eighteen, she could never risk looking for his grandparents; he’d interpret it as a long-broken promise to find grandpa and grandma. She had to start talking to Teddie like he was a teenager instead of a kid, not just in terms of vocabulary.
She pointed toward the handle of the Big Dipper. “Do you see that fuzzy star in the bend of the handle? That’s called Mizar. Do you know why it’s so special?” She could feel the sheet tug as he nodded his head from side to side. “It’s actually two stars, so close together that they look like one.”
“You mean like a binary star, where they rotate around a central point between them?” Teddie had definitely been reading the library’s astronomy books. “They say that most of the stars are in groups of two or more, but most of their companions are much smaller or less bright so we can never see them.”
“No, Mizar is different. The two stars are millions of miles apart, not in the same system at all. They are so lined up in a straight line, when we look at them, they just look like they’re right next to each other.” She handed him the small pair of binoculars. “This will help.”
Teddie sighed, “I can see them now. It’s just a trick of perspective.”
Hoping to stave off any other uncomfortable questions, she decided to ask some before he could. “So how was school today, hun? Learn anything interesting?” Margot had a variation of this conversation with her son every evening, and the simplest inquiry usually led to her son talking non-stop for an hour.
“It was Columbus Day, so we learned how he sailed in the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria to the New World. I don’t get why they say that he discovered America, as if all of this wasn’t here until he found it. We learned about the Pueblo Indians last week, and they told us how they’ve been in this part of New Mexico at least nine thousand years—Columbus got here barely five hundred years ago.” He laughed, and said, “They must really think us kids are stupid, mama.”
“I don’t think it’s that, Teddie,” she replied soothingly. “And you’re right that America was here whether or not Columbus ever found it. But when I was in school, they told us that Columbus was a hero because he had the courage to sail over here when everyone thought that the world was flat and you would die if you sailed over the edge.”
Teddie burst out laughing like he was being tickled. “That’s silly, mama! The world isn’t flat, it’s round!”
“We know that now, but people weren’t as smart as we are today.” She swept her hand upward. “Back then, they didn’t even know that every star was a burning sun like our own, just very, very far away. And they didn’t know the earth is round either.”
“But that’s crazy, mama. Anyone can see that the world is round.” Teddie’s breathing got louder, and she realized that the walk was much harder on his short legs, especially while talking. She saw a sizeable outcropping a dozen yards away and headed toward it.
“Sweetheart, I’m getting tired. Do you mind if we rest here for a bit?,” she asked, hoping he’d not try to be too brave and say no.
Gasping, the boy said “Okay mama, if that’s what you want, I’ll stop for a little.”
Margot was curious. “Okay, my little genius, why is it so terribly obvious that the world is round?”
This was another one of those little questions that opened wide Teddie’s verbal floodgates. He told her that even though we know the moon spins, it does so in such perfect harmony with the earth that the same side always faces us, and that there was a dark side of the moon that nobody had ever seen. He explained that as the moon went through its phases, the fact that the shadows on it were curved could only happen if the sun’s light was shining on a round object, and a crescent moon showed this best. If the moon was flat, there would always be straight lines as the sunlight shifted as the moon travelled around the earth, so it would look like a door slowly closing.
His voice rising in excitement, Teddie concluded that if the moon was round, than surely the earth was too, regardless of which revolved around the other. “And do you know the best way to see that the earth is round?” Transfixed, she nodded no. “An eclipse!” he shouted, and started giggling and stomping his feet. “You can see the round shadow of the earth as it passes over the moon. It’s like someone is shining a flashlight on it, just to prove to everyone down here that it’s round.”
Wanting to encourage a sense of the divine along with his book-smarts, Margot asked “So Einstein, are you saying that God invented eclipses to show us the world is round?”
Teddie laughed, then matter-of-factly replied, “No, silly. There’s no such thing as God.”
* * * * *
Suzanne Deborah Johnson– Annapolis, Maryland
(September 9, 1979)
Debbie Johnson sat in the bleachers staring intently ahead, primed to explode. Unlike the other parents, she wasn’t waiting for an unfavorable call by a referee or to chew out the coach for not giving their kid enough playing time. She was watching the sweeper, who on two previous plays had tried to trip Suzie when the ball was on the other side of the field. She had no problem with aggressive and physical play, absolutely not—she was notorious for throwing elbows on the Academy basketball courts. But cheap shots were a different matter entirely. Her daughter was more than able to defend herself, but not an attack that she couldn’t see coming.
“Keep your eyes open, ref, they’re mugging her out there,” she shouted through cupped hands. “Card him for that crap.”
A chubby man in a windbreaker in the visiting team’s colors turned and said loudly, pretending not to direct it towards her, “Call it both ways, no special treatment for pussies.”
Debbie stared at him, trying to let her anger subside. It wasn’t working. “Did you just call my daughter a pussy?”
The guy tried to be coy. “I wasn’t directing at anyone in particular.” He turned away from her, then changed his mind, apparently having thought up what he deemed a clever comeback. “But if I did, I don’t see why either one of you would be upset, seeing as you get to see a pussy every day.” Apparently assuming that she was as dense as he was, he pointed at his crotch for emphasis.
“Look, Porky, I know you’re cranky from being away from Bugs and your other cartoon pals, but don’t take it out on my kid,” she said. “Especially when they’re down by three goals . . . to a team with a girl on it.” She pointed to the scoreboard.
“Look lady, all I’m saying is, if your kid wants to play a man’s sport, she needs to learn to take it like a man. Unless she’s a lezbo, of course.” As he slid down the metal bench toward her, his condescending look morphed into a leer. “Speaking of taking it like a man, I could give it to you real good.” His hand reached over towards her lap.
The second his hand touched between her legs, she thought she’d just snap the thumb back until it broke, but four rows up in the bleachers was not an ideal place for a wrestling match. So with a sudden thrust, she drove her middle three fingers deep into the soft recess of his Adam’s apple. With the heel of her other hand, Debbie drove his chin straight upward, snapping his jaw shut on his tongue.
“You futhing bith!” he screamed. By now, there was enough distance between them that she could jam her heel into his solar plexus, leaving him gasping for breath. A trickle of blood leaked out from each side of his mouth. Looking for support from the other people in the stands, he grunted weakly “awnt you goin to hep me?” Instead, they pretended not to hear him and stared silently and more intently at their kids on the field.
“No, they aren’t going to do a damn thing, any more than they were going to do anything to help me,” she said. “They’re as pathetic as you are.” Debbie got up and started toward the goal where Suzie was nearest.
Having caught his breath enough, the man grunted “Ahm gonna call the copth! Ahm gonna sue you!”
She couldn’t resist. Debbie walked back to the bleachers, the man’s jacket now spotted with a few red droplets, and said “No need, I’m already here.” She leaned in and whispered, “and be sure to tell them that Sergeant Johnson, Badge # 622, just kicked your sorry ass.” She handed him a small towel that she had brought for Suzie and said, “Wipe your mouth off before you ruin someone else’s clothes. Unless you want me to go get my handcuffs, shut your mouth, watch the game, and never touch a woman like that again.”
* * * * *
Cecile Claire Sampson – Nashville, Tennessee
(April 11, 1984)
Kevin was trying to stay awake as he ran monthly diagnostics on the gas chromatographs. Insert a known sample, test it three times, calibrate to the mean, and do it for another known sample. Lather, rinse, repeat. Then he got a call from the main office telling him that he needed to go to the high school, immediately.
As he ran to his car in the plant parking lot, he saw a dozen other employees racing to their vehicles, and recognized several of them as having children at the same school. As a member of upper management, his parking spot was near the main entrance, so he got to his Impala and out the gate before anyone else, and ended up leading a rag-tag procession of cars speeding to the school. A half mile away, he could see blue and red lights flashing, with two fire trucks and a couple of police cars clustered together.
The police had placed traffic cones and yellow tape to block entry to the parking lot, so he parked on the shoulder and ran to the first officer he spotted. “What’s going on here?”
The officer, barely out of his teens himself, with a crew-cut that made him look even younger, was nonetheless calm and imposing. “Calm down, sir, and stay behind the barrier.” Seeing the panic in Kevin’s eyes, he added “It’s not as bad as it looks.”
What it looked like was there’d been a fire or similar emergency, and school officials were checking names before letting them leave. There were two large crowds of children about a hundred yards away. One group was sitting on the ground, and every few seconds one got up and ran or walked over to the parking lot to meet their parents.
The other group of kids was father away, and they seemed to be drawing all the firefighter and police interest. It looked like some of the kids were being sprayed down, not with the big firehoses, but small ones hooked to the school water. The odd thing was there seemed to be a dense gray cloud floating over that group. It was moving, hovering from side to side, sometimes dipping down into the crowd of children, which made some of them duck or jump to the ground. It reminded Kevin, of all things, of diagrams he’d seen of electron or molecular orbitals in his chemistry texts, statistical representations of the movements of electrons oscillating between hundreds of positions at near the speed of light. He knew it wasn’t that, but the way that the cloud seemed to continually ebb and flow, moving in conjunction with the children nearby, there was some connection between it and the kids. Whatever it was, it had scared the hell out of everyone, since the few kids being released from the cloud group, soaked to the skin from the hoses, were bawling their eyes out and looked terrified.
He was transfixed at the almost harmonic movement of the cloud when he heard Cecile’s voice call out, “Dad!”
He whirled and saw that she was dry, so she must not have been exposed to whatever toxin the hosed group was having washed off their body. “What the hell is going on here?”
Cecile hugged him tight, and she didn’t say another word until they were inside of the Impala. “Daddy, if I did something really stupid, will you promise me you won’t get mad?”
Nobody in the history of parenting had ever heard those words and not gotten angry. “Cici, I can’t make that promise, but I’ll stay as calm as I can and try to help you. What exactly did you do?”
“It was just supposed to be a prank, a little joke, Daddy. I didn’t mean to cause all this. I just wanted to get a little revenge on Mr. Gregson.”
Kevin was losing patience. “What. Did. You. Do.”
“You know how I was working on a chemistry project for the science fair, right? I stayed after school a few times to test the properties of different things in the human body.”
“Right, right, testing the heat content of fats, cholesterol, different types of sugars, things like that. You were supposed to finish up this week.”
Cecile’s voice became a whisper. “I made something slightly different. A pheromone. For Gypsy moths.”
Kevin was familiar with pheromones, the powerful sex-attracting chemicals used by many species of animals, especially insects, to find a ready mate. He knew that they were complicated molecules, not something easily made at a university-grade lab. He knew that Gypsy moths were a dangerous pest, one that infested trees, like a boll weevil that ate wood. If she somehow caused these damaging moths to swarm in their town, she could be in real trouble. “Get in the car right now, we have to leave.”
His daughter started to hyperventilate. “Am I going to go to jail?”
Glancing about to make sure no police officer was looking to stop them, they drove away, lost amid the caravan of parents leaving after being reunited with their children. “Cecile, I need you to tell me everything. After that, I need you to never, ever, ever tell anyone else about this.”
Once she was away from the school, she broke down. She saw a news story on TV about a Park Ranger who had accidentally been exposed to Gypsy moth pheromone—the government uses it as a lure in its eradication program—and a swarm of them followed the Ranger for six months. The segment was meant to be funny, as it showed the Ranger going about his duties in the forest with dozens of little moths fluttering wherever he went. Cecile figured she could make a little bit of the pheromone, get some of it on some boys as a prank, and that would be it. “Gypsy moths don’t live in Tennessee, but I knew some of the boys were going on Easter break in the northeast, where they’re common. I didn’t think it’d be the worst thing in the world to have bugs all around them for a few days—that’s how they make us girls feel most of the time.”
When they got home, Kevin did some more research about the substance used in his daughter’s prank. Gypsy moth antennae are so sensitive that a few molecules of the pheromone can be detected from more than a mile away, so a mere drop can make someone a bug magnet. The common name for the pheromone is disparlure, which means “destroyer,”, and it contains an internal ether segment, which is incredibly difficult to form. Instead of oxygen bonding in the middle of a chain of carbon atoms, as is the case for 90% of ether compounds, the oxygen bonds at a sharp bend of a long strand of carbon atoms, with the ‘O’ forming a rigid elbow that locks the bend into place. This version of the molecule might make up 2-3% of a reaction product, so one could keep mixing the chains and painstakingly extract these trace amounts, but it would take forever, maybe producing one talcum-powder-sized crystal from each batch.
He called Cecile down from her room, where she had barricaded herself since getting home. “Have you told me everything about this? Some stuff doesn’t add up. How did you make the pheromone?”
Despite her fear of getting in trouble, she got excited as she explained her method. She knew that the school didn’t have the organic compounds or expensive catalysts to build such a large compound, so she figured she could break down more complex fats and use their pieces. Once she looked up the structure of cholesterol after she found a big jar of the crystalline form in the school’s chem supply closet, she knew she could bend and break it into disparlure. “It took me five tries to figure it out, but I tested its melting point and optical properties and knew it was the right pheromone.” Kevin was a little proud that his analytical gifts had been passed down with his height.
Somehow Cecile had broken the much larger and more complex cholesterol molecule into pieces and figured out a way to make the biggest piece remaining turn into disparlure. It was the equivalent of smashing an eighteen-wheeler in order to construct a bunch of Ford Pintos. “So how did you separate and purify it? I know your school doesn’t have the equipment for that.”
She seemed a little miffed and said, “Yeah, I knew that there was a lot of other stuff mixed in each batch that I couldn’t get out. So on later batches, I didn’t distill it as much out of fear of missing some of the stuff I wanted. I didn’t think those small amounts would make much difference in the mix, and it was easier for me to collect almost an ounce.”
Now Kevin understood why her compound had drawn insects when Gypsy moths were hundreds of miles away. Other insect species must have had pheromones that were chemically similar, as a result of a similar evolution or a common ancestor. The various permutations of the disparlure had a weakened effect on other insects, so instead of attacking or sticking to the kids clothes, they were generally drawn to the area. It must have been terrifying to the children, as more and more lovesick bugs began to swarm around them, ignoring their swats and following them everywhere they went. As far as persistence and libido, the most hormone-charged teen had nothing on an insect so focused on passing on their genes that they were willing to mate and immediately die.
He asked, “I still don’t understand how it got on so many kids.’ He looked Cecile angrily in the eye. “Who were you really trying to prank?”
She turned rose and admitted, “Mr. Gregson. He a few months ago mentioned in class that he was going to Boston over Easter break. I figured he’d go up there, a few moths would follow him around, but it’d be all over with when he came back here.”
“The perfect crime,” he said. Kevin smirked at his daughter’s cleverness. “But why him? I thought he was one of your better teachers.”
“Don’t you remember? He was the one that told me I couldn’t join the military because I had to stay home.” Her jaw locked and she was getting angry just remembering it. “Mr. Gregson just kept making jokes about girls having to make babies. I asked him a bunch of times to stop, that it was mean to me and the other girls, but he wouldn’t—he made them even more. He told me that it was only a joke and that I needed a get better sense of humor.”
Kevin tried to conceal his sympathy for his daughter. “I guess this was a chance to see if he has a sense of humor.”
Cecile explained, “There’s a small men’s bathroom near his classroom that I’ve seen him go into. He’s kind of a neat freak, always washing his hands, so one day after school, I put a few drops of the pheromone into the liquid soap dispenser. I knew it would take a few days to work its way down, and it would take only a teeny amount to do the trick.”
“Didn’t you realize that other people would use that bathroom too?” he asked.
“Daddy, the boys at my school are so gross, I never dreamed that they actually washed their hands after they pee. A lot of them come out of the bathroom and tell the girls that they peed on their hands. Then they chase us on the playground trying to touch us.”
Kevin finally laughed. “Well, you managed to punish exactly the boys who did wash their hands, so you aren’t quite the evil genius supervillain you thought. Though I have to admit, making them the object of the insects’ affections is a good form of poetic justice.” He was more concerned with what she did to a teacher, so his voice grew stern. “Cecile, you can’t do this sort of thing to every person who makes you angry. Mr. Gregson may be a jerk, but you can’t take revenge against a teacher like this. Someone could have been seriously hurt, especially another student.”
She looked at him pleadingly. “Daddy, he thought it was funny.” She let her words sink in. “Mr. Gregson thought telling me and all the other girls, day after day, that we couldn’t have dreams was something to joke about, to make fun of.” She was so angry, her voice was wavering, and she began to cry. He pulled her against him and held her through the sobs, torn between his need to punish her for her actions and his understanding that somebody had already been hurt.
* * * * *
Li-Peng Jingwei– Nanking, China
(December 26, 1968-Chairman Mao’s birthday)
He carefully dripped the wax into the cracks and seams in the wooden box, taking time to ensure that they filled completely, Peng couldn’t afford even the smallest hole. Wen was asleep, exhausted from both her job at the Agricultural Institute and carrying a baby that had finally started to push her flat stomach outward. It took him at least an hour to melt wax into every seam inside the box, and when he was finished, he did the same on the outside, just to be safe. He was pleased by his work, although the lid had to remain unsealed for now. He had at most another two hours to finish his work, before the first rays of dawn came across the river and into the open side of the courtyard. He also expected many of his fellow residents to awaken early, to prepare for the celebration and parades; they shouldn’t start the raucous banging of pots and pans until the afternoon, which would allow Wen to get much needed sleep for her and the baby, he hoped a son.
All the time he sealed the box, he was watched by the loyal Ash, guarding him like a royal bodyguard. Peng went into the highest shelf of the pantry and removed a small container with a thumb-sized piece of salmon, wrapped in white cheesecloth. He broke off a small sliver and tasted it, perfectly salted and still fresh with flavor; he had saved it for today’s festivities. He held out another sliver of the fish to Ash, who scampered over and licked it as Peng held the piece, he could feel the raspy-rough tongue on his fingertips, in the silence he could hear the gentle “thfft, thfft, thfft” as the cat nibbled. Once Ash finished the treat, Peng stroked his head and under his chin until the cat walked onto his lap and lay down, ready to nap.
“How about a little more, my friend,” whispered Peng as he fed him an even smaller sliver of the salmon. Ash perked up and snapped the piece right into his mouth, licking his own lips this time. Now Peng took the whole piece of fish, held it a foot from the cat’s face, and gently placed it into the wooden box. Ash stood up, and to make sure that the cat didn’t grab the piece and run off, Peng carefully lifted him into the box, softly pressing his four feet together so that Ash settled inside the box fully. The cat set to licking the large piece of salmon, and Pend continued to stroke it while he did, the purring showing that he was relaxed in his new home. Quickly but not abruptly, to avoid startling the creature, he closed the lid firmly, and grabbing the lit candle, began sealing the fresh and uneven gaps. This time he moved glacially, so that plenty of wax would seep deep into the seams, only moving on when he saw the cracks fill. “I’m so sorry, my friend, and thank you.”
Later that afternoon, when the fireworks started and songs celebrating the revolution, workers, and the Chairman filled the building, Wen finally asked about the cat. Peng instinctively glanced at his cot, but realized the error and looked straight in her eyes when he said “all this noise is probably spooking him, he’s probably hiding somewhere until it stops.” Satisfied with his explanation, she asked nothing else. He was worried she might look around their apartment for Ash and spot the box under his bed, covered by an old towel. But Wen’s willingness to bend over now that she was in her fifth month was nonexistent, so she took him at his word.
He wondered how long to wait before he could safely open it. Cats didn’t need much air to survive, and the box wasn’t very large, but he had to be sure it was dead. He couldn’t have Ash waking from a stupor—that would ruin the whole plan. The whole point of the suffocation was to be a silent demise, and if he had to strangle even a groggy cat with his bare hands, it could make noise and draw his neighbors’ attention, if not Wen’s. The brutality of such an act disgusted Peng, but sometimes you have to do what is necessary to survive—if there was any lesson he’d learned in the last decade, it was that. He and Wen would surely miss the cat, he didn’t want to hurt it, in fact, he might even love the cat. But if it was necessary to protect his family, Peng would kill the cat.
* * * * *
Suzanne Deborah Johnson– Annapolis, Maryland
(September 9, 1979)
Debbie and Suzie Johnson sat in silence for most of the ride home. Finally, the girl said “Why do you have to draw attention to yourself wherever we go? Why can’t you be a normal parent?”
“I’m sorry honey, but I can’t just let a man grab my crotch.” She shook her head and added, “And I don’t want to hear anything about you wanting to be normal. Normal is average, average is typical, and the average, typical person is fat, lazy, and dumb. I want more for you than to be merely normal.”
The girl was weeping now, the wind from the open window pushing the tears into herky-jerky trickles that meandered over her cheekbones to her ears. “You may not like fitting in, but I do. You think it’s easy being the only girl on a boys soccer team?”
Debbie smiled. “That’s because you’re special. You should never be embarrassed to be as good or better than a boy. I’m not.”
“Yeah, but I’m not you.” She was tugging the bottom of her jersey up to wipe the tears, but it just smeared the reddish clay into rings around her eyes.
“Stop doing that, you’re making yourself look like a raccoon,” Debbie said, flipping the visor down so her daughter could see how she looked. “See?”
Suzie glanced up and started laughing—she did look like a raccoon or a lemur or some mother animal. But then she remembered that she was angry at her mother and got upset that she had been so easily distracted. “I’m serious, mom. I’m barely eleven, I don’t want all the attention and hassle of being the only girl. You’re good at that stuff, getting in people’s faces, making them back down, but I’m not.” She started crying softly again, and asked, “Seriously, do I have to stay on the team?
Debbie knew that what her child said was true. Suzie had inherited all of her athletic talent and intelligence, but none of her mental toughness, her relentless drive to prove doubters wrong—not having this characteristic wasn’t the worst thing in the world. In its place, her daughter possessed a real kindness, a sincere concern for other people that sometimes Debbie envied. Suzie could open up to people and make friends effortlessly, and that kind of emotional boldness required courage too.
“Honey, I’m so hard on you because I know how far you can go. Playing with the boys will make you better, and I only want the best for you. That’s why I have fought so hard to be treated as an equal, so you won’t have to.” The car pulled into the driveway at the end of the cul-de-sac, and Debbie reached over and unbuckled the seat belt as she spoke to her. “I don’t want you to be me. I want you to be you.” Her daughter leaned towards her and rested her head on Debbie’s arm.
“Let’s make a deal, mom. I’ll finish out this season, but next year we’ll find a girls soccer league for me to play in.” She held out her little finger, waiting for her mother to seal the deal with a pinky swear.
Debbie nodded yes, and said “As long as you promise me that you’ll play your best and raise hell in these next games, it’s a deal. Even if we have to drive to Virginia or Pennsylvania to find a team good enough for you.” She reached over and locked pinkies firmly, until her daughter yanked hers out with a flourish.
Suzie smiled and said “Don’t worry mom, I’m no quitter.”
* * * * *
Li-Peng Jingwei– Nanking, China
(December 26, 1968-Chairman Mao’s birthday)
He spent the night turning from side to side. After an hour of this, Wen started kicking him, so he got up from the thin pad that was their bed and curled up on a blanket on the floor. She had probably done him a favor, as it would be easier this way to rise without waking her. He needed to retrieve the wooden box, remove the hopefully now-dead cat, and hide Ash’s body somewhere he could discover it in Wen’s presence. He knew that she was emotional about such things, and her tears would lend needed authenticity, preventing the neighbors from questioning his subsequent actions.
If only he could know for certain if the cat was dead yet. He knew that as the air in the box depleted, Ash would grow drowsy, which in turn would slow her respiration, delaying her eventual suffocation. If the box wasn’t perfectly air-tight, could enough oxygen seep in to keep the cat alive through the night? Peng didn’t think so, but he didn’t want to risk opening the box and the sudden rush of air reviving Ash, allowing her to escape.
So with an hour before sunrise, he removed the box from its hiding place and took it to the top of the stairwell, careful that he didn’t wake anyone or was seen. He slid a knife blade under the lid, cutting through the wax, and pried the top off. There was a slight whistle as it opened, created by the vacuum from Ash’s consuming the box’s oxygen, and Peng pulled the cat from the box, her paws dangling as he grasped her waist. He placed her on his lap, but as soon as his cool fingers felt her soft fur, by muscle reflex he began stroking the hair. Ash was heavy and pliable, a little bit warm in the stomach, but the legs and feet more stiff. He was confident that she was dead, but he had to be sure, so he cupped the back of her head in his left hand and her chest in his right.
For a moment he hesitated, feeling the softest fur under Ash’s neck, remembering how she would rub the sides of her mouth against his hand, and purr. He suddenly twisted his hands in opposite directions, feeling a pop and seeing the cat’s face twisted in a grimace, the neck now frozen, forever looking over its shoulder. He put Ash back in the box, returned to the apartment to make sure Wen was still asleep, and silently slid the cat’s body in a far corner behind a bookshelf, a place that nobody would have reason to look behind, but where a cat could plausibly get hurt and die, peacefully, more peaceful in theory than in execution.
The afternoon went exactly as he’d hoped. He found and then mournfully carried Ash’s body to his wife, who couldn’t stop crying. Despite their feverish preparations for the Chairman’s birthday and the sporadic beating of pans and cheering that erupted around the city, several of their neighbors heard Wen’s cries and came over; they too began to weep—Ash was both adorable and an effective mouser. When Peng mentioned the need to “dispose” of Ash’s body, they wailed even louder, until he suggested burying Ash with the respect afforded such a popular creature. There was nowhere nearby to perform the deed, with sidewalk and concrete dominating that section of Nanking, so he delicately suggested that a remote corner of the courtyard would be appropriate; they quickly agreed. He borrowed a hand spade from a neighbor, and Peng headed toward the familiar corner and began hacking away at the weeds.
He had wrapped Ash in a small piece of burlap that covered everything except the ends of his paws, a sight that scared the children into moving their games to the other end of the courtyard. Peng mentally measured three hand-widths down each side of the cornered wall, making an imaginary grid, and he started scratching at the hard earth. He was positioned so his body shielded the hole from any onlookers, even those on the higher floors, and he took his time, forcing himself to take slow, even breaths despite his rising tension. When he had dug elbow-deep, and after several false alarms of hitting rocks, Peng struck what looked like the top of a dried onion. He brushed off the dirt and saw burlap, a more brittle version of what Ash was draped in. Delicately, he dug around the ball, softening the earth to avoid the metal striking it.
Once he had loosened enough earth that he would be able to pull the ball out, he slid Ash, still covered by the cloth, to a spot in front of his knees. He made a brief bow to the grave, knowing that anything more could be viewed as a prayer. Grasping the cat’s body through the burlap, he slid Ash over the hole, loosened his grip enough for her to fall in, and in the same motion reached in and grabbed the ball with the burlap, successfully masking the act of removing it. He gathered the cloth into a loose ball and left it on the far side of the hole as he quickly covered Ash with dirt, not willing to risk letting a curious or morbid child see the contents. He grabbed the object, balled-up burlap cloth, and spade all in one hand, which he held close to his waist, and quickly returned to his apartment, where Wen was still sobbing.
“Are you finished?” she asked. The tears had made widening streaks down her cheeks that radiated from her eyes. “Can we place a marker on the grave, something to remember him by?” Peng was a little surprised at the intensity of his wife’s grief, and at the same time he welcomed it as an indication of her greater compassion, a quality that would balance his own objective logic and would be necessary, as they would soon be raising a child.
Not wanting a long conversation, Peng assured her that he would find a nice flat stone that they could write Ash’s name on, but they would have to place it after the birthday festivities. He quickly washed his hands, placed the ball in one of his socks, then hid it near his underwear and shaving gear, and joined in the food and noise in the apartment courtyard, where the whole building had congregated for the special occasion.
Despite the myriad distractions, the day moved as slowly as a river barge. Wen went to bed early, exhausted from her sorrow, which allowed him to retrieve the item from his shoe. Carefully, Peng unwrapped the several layers of thick cloth that covered it, revealing a bright Russian nesting doll, perhaps as tall as the side of his hand. He patiently twisted the head back in forth until it broke free, and within it was a much smaller item, also wrapped in cloth—another nesting doll, maybe as tall as his pinky. He repeated the gentle twisting motion on the head, afraid that too much force might crack it and damage its contents, and bit by bit the head slid off the doll, revealing a thin rectangle, flat and covered in what looked like a tiny piece of silk.
Finally, Peng found the seam where the flaps of the silk had been pressed together, pulled them apart, and even in the dim light, the colors leapt out at him, the red border of the stamp contrasting with the image of an antique bi-plane flying upside-down. It was in perfect condition, as pristine and vibrant as when he’d sealed between two diaphanous panes of plastic those many years ago, after painstakingly desiccating it in the lab: the rare and beautiful 1918 Inverted Jenny, one of less than a hundred known to exist, an unassuming mix of paper and glue that held his family’s entire fortune, as well as its future, and that would transform the lives of Peng and his family by delivering them to a safer, freer life outside of the People’s Republic of China.