embalming the photographs

In what looked like a last-minute effort, UCSD also asked me to fly out on their dollar.  I’ll be at 67 degrees by Tuesday.  I’ll be hiking on the beach and thinking about the desert. With the ocean to my face, Joshua Tree will be only a handful of hours behind me.

An old climbing partner is at UCSD. I have a soft spot for his face because he was an escape portal during a bad summer. I was in Princeton because of my dad’s health — we knew it was the end but no one called it that. I sat waiting, read newspapers, and climbed. We met at the gym, climbed outdoors, and took winding roads in a slow lean on his motorcycle. Until I met him I never had the chance to walk into a dim bar wearing a leather jacket and carrying a motorcycle helmet. That crush still feels like the most generous and necessary life preserver. Like a life-preserver-hot-air-balloon. He asked me out the day my dad died.

I’ll only get a chance to see him briefly. During my visit he will be driving up and down the coast for job interviews and girlfriend commitments.  Best this way, I think: I don’t want all the air released out of his body.  It’s dangerous to remember when the past can puncture on the present. How do I keep him after I re-meet him?

The post-doc’s wife gave birth on Sunday. The baby, aimed for Valentine’s day, was early but perfectly formed and a healthy weight.  He came in late yesterday, as I was finishing up, and we talked about her pink, scrunched-up face.  He looked older, calmer, and like the distance his eyes focused on had increased by a number of feet.  What struck him was the utter helplessness of little Tara. She has to be taught to eat. Her tiny puffy fists had to be put in a baby straight jacket so she doesn’t hurt herself. How does such a useless, fleshy, floppy existence survive? This is the product of evolution? This was born to our cold, hungry grandparents without penicillin? This lived in the woods, the Savannah, the winter, the stiff breeze?  It’s enough to make me believe in god: a large, extremely benign hand shielding the soft head for 1-2 years at least.

We also talked about the wish to be remembered.  I see it as a mis-placed impulse wrongly housing two desires: live forever; have high status.  Being remembered is not going to help you with either. While a body in the ground, your distorted image in another mortal, infinitely selfish mind is not going to keep you warm. And while being known is going to help your status, being remembered is a symptom of being known but is too little too late. Therefore, there is no reason you want to be remembered. I’m afraid of being remembered because it is a symptom of being dead.

I don’t often write about my biologist self — the one who is currently sitting in a white lab coat, waiting for some nematode worms with Alzheimer’s to sink to the bottom of the tube. To tell you the truth, almost everything I do outside of the lab bench, including bouts of writing, is to escape her fate. Right now, the long tendons stringing my knuckles between the wrist and the fingers are burning. I have spent all day moving my poor, dumb worms to measure chemotaxis. I gulped down portabella soup between experiment 4 and experiment 5. This is going to be a long day. Somehow, it works out though. By the time you are done collecting data you are too tired to analyze the results. So when you finally find out that this or that didn’t work and nothing is significant, you are too far gone to care or it’s days later and you already forgot the pain.

Today I lit my sweater on fire.  Most often, when you are flaming things to sterilize, burning ethanol is involved. A drop on fire must have somehow landed on me. The sweater started to smoke and melt. I have never done something like this before. Hence, I am now wearing a lab coat. I normally don’t like to wear them. They are come in pasty white and hang way past my knees. I feel like a ghost. Especially since the lab empties out on the weekend. Some of the rooms are darkened. I spend my day not talking to anyone. It’s enough to scare a girl when she walks past a dark window.

On January 29, 1979, an Elementary School was under shotgun fire. During this first school shooting, a reporter started calling the houses in the area to find an eyewitness. At the house nearest to the building, a girl’s voice picked up. “Can you see what is going on at the school?” “Yes.” “Can you see where the shooting is coming from?” “Yes.” She gave the reporter the address of the house he was calling. “Who do you think is doing the shooting?” she asked.

During that phone call, Brenda Spencer gave the only interview at the time of her arrest. The reporter asked why she was doing this, she said “I hate Mondays. This livens up the day.” When asked who she wanted to shoot, she said “I like the red and the blue jackets best.”

I think everything she said after that has been a lie. At various parole hearings she blamed depression, her father, PCP. Unlike the rest of it, her first detachment, the unmistakable sound of a complete lack of remorse, was not taught. Something fundamental escaped to the surface: the lack of sacred meaning, inherent value that human life has. We are special only if we perceive it. We need to guard this illusion to guard ourselves. We like to think it’s physically impossible to gun down children.

If she is crazy, what does the word mean? Can we talk ourselves into crazy? What is she missing? Can she get well?

a friend’s post jogged a memory…

in elementary school, my first year in the “american” system, the upper grades made a musical instrument out of the multi-story playground complex. we spent weeks designing it and a month converting the slides and staircases and bridges. i wish i could remember what we named it.  the structure was the size of a small apartment and ran on buckets and buckets of water.  drops echoed on metal, spinning wheels rang half-full jars, plastic bottoms boomed under a torrent.  it was a constant… musical waterfall… which is what we called it!
the saddest day was to take it down.  the second saddest was the day i realized such a game would not be repeated every year in america.