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There was nothing Tempo hated more than lying to a grown up, but she didn’t want to disappoint Joy, who’d done her a huge favor by even telling her about the babysitting in the first place. Although they’d been friends for forever, Tempo hadn’t been Joy’s best friend forever in years. In fact, it had come as a complete shock when Joy pulled her out of the lunch line earlier that day and told Tempo she’d found her a job babysitting for the Peraltas. Tempo couldn’t help asking why Joy didn’t want the job herself.

Joy’s eyes did a loop-the-loop. Her goody goody sister Denise, who’d sat for the Peraltas before she graduated, had let it slip that Joy had only just finished eighth grade. Not to mention the fact that Joy was, face it, horrible with little kids.

“Mrs. P. and I didn’t really jell,” Joy said. “But she’s bound to like you. You’re such a goody goody, too.”

Maybe compared to Joy, but Tempo wasn’t anywhere in the same universe as Denise-who’d made National Honors Society and led Chesterton’s tennis team to the state finals. Who’d just started college at Princeton. Tempo knew that when it came time to apply for colleges, she’d be dying to get into somewhere like Princeton.

“Anyhow,” Joy said, “can’t you use the money?”

Although Joy didn’t mean it in a mean way, Tempo shut right up after that. Joy went on, saying the Peraltas paid, like, ten bucks an hour, and the kids were easy peasy. The only thing was, Mrs. Peralta was anally retentive, and she wanted babysitters with “a certain level of maturity.” Translation: fourteen-year-olds need not apply.

Joy, however, had it all figured out, and she’d invited Tempo over to her house after school. Now, in her bedroom, which was about a hundred times messier than Tempo remembered it, Joy was making Tempo rehearse everything she was going to say. When they finally called up Mrs. Peralta and right off the bat the lady wanted to know her age, Tempo just replied, “Sixteen, Mrs. Peralta.”

The woman asked whether Tempo had her license yet.

“Almost sixteen,” Tempo said. Already, the whole thing wasn’t sitting well with her.

Mrs. Peralta was quiet, and Tempo would have hung up right then and there, except Joy was sitting up on the bed and making frantic come-on-come-on motions with her hands.

Tell her about the class, Joy whispered. Sell yourself.

Tempo told Mrs. Peralta that over the summer she’d taken the Red Cross babysitting course, which covered safety-related topics and stuff like how to role model and positively influence younger children. She talked about her cousins, who were the exact same ages as Elizabeth and Edwin. She watched her cousins almost every weekend because her aunt and her mom both worked at the mall on Saturdays. Which was ad-libbed, but totally true. Joy smiled and began twirling her way around the clumps of dirty laundry on the floor.

“I see,” Mrs. Peralta said, in a tone Tempo couldn’t quite work out. Sometimes people got judgy about single mothers who had to work on weekends, and so that Mrs. Peralta wouldn’t think she was a charity case (and so Joy wouldn’t think so, either), Tempo said she just wanted to earn some pocket change.

Joy stopped twirling. Pocket money, she said, but Tempo didn’t correct herself.

“I understand,” Mrs. Peralta said, and to Tempo’s relief, she began to ask about grades and favorite subjects. (English, and math was a close second.)

Mrs. Peralta asked whether she had a boyfriend.

“No, ma’am.” Tempo thought about her mother’s boyfriend, Allan. He wore tons of cologne, but he always smelled like he’d just climbed out of a deep fryer. Just thinking about how her mother’s clothes reeked every time she went out made Tempo sick to her stomach.

She went into the final part of her speech, saying how adorable and funny and smart Elizabeth and Edwin must be. She was dying to meet them. Joy flopped back onto the bed, snickering, while Tempo said she loved spending time with kids that age-what with their energy, their innocence.

“Very well,” Mrs. Peralta said. Tempo could almost make out the smile in her voice. “Next Thursday. Quarter to six.”

Tempo thanked her, got off the phone, and grinned at Joy, who bounced off the bed, punched a fist in the air, and shouted, “Score!” Just like the boys she was always hanging around with these days.

 

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Tempo hadn’t been exaggerating when she told Mrs. Peralta she loved spending time with kids. She had a knack for figuring out children, like factoring and the quadratic formula. Whereas sometimes she couldn’t buy a clue about what the girls in her grade were so fascinated with. She’d almost rather babysit than hang out with her so-called peers.

Still, Thursday afternoon, she wasn’t exactly feeling like the babysitter of the year. It was about a thousand degrees out, and she had to walk all the way down past the high school and up Grandview Ave, where the houses went from big to huge to monstrous. By the time she reached the Peraltas’, she’d gone from semi-sweaty to completely gross. After she rang the doorbell, she wiped her forehead with her wrist and peered at her reflection (yuck) in the little privacy window beside the door.

Mrs. Peralta, dressed in a simple black sheath that probably cost a hundred bucks at Bloomingdale’s, smiled at Tempo, and Tempo shook hands and glanced into the entryway-the foyer-with its marble tile, flowers bursting from vases set in recesses in the wall, a wide staircase that swept up and around and up and around.

“You have a lovely home, Mrs. Peralta.” She tried to make it sound natural.

Mrs. Peralta said, “You look a bit flushed. Ungodly hot for September, isn’t it?” She felt Tempo’s forehead in a motherly kind of way. Her hand was cool and steady.

She let Tempo into the house (the AC was cranked) and called for her children. Two seconds later, the girl appeared. Elizabeth-seven years old, with her hair up in a French braid, a dress that might have matched her mother’s except hers had a bow in the front.

The girl squinted at Tempo and said, “I don’t need a babysitter.”

Tempo’s cousin often used that same line, and so Tempo said she was just there to babysit a little boy. “I think his name’s Edward?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “Edwin. His name is Ed-win.”

Tempo went on, saying she’d feed Edwin lots of junk food and candy and soda-which caused Elizabeth to gasp out loud and her mother to frown. Tempo told them she’d let him play outside, but only up on the roof, and afterward she’d make sure he didn’t take a bath or brush his teeth before she put him to bed, which would probably be sometime after midnight.

The girl was giggling now and telling Tempo that was all wrong wrong wrong. Tempo said shoot, maybe she’d need somebody to keep it all straight for her, and Mrs. Peralta smiled as Elizabeth offered her gracious assistance.

Upstairs, somebody screamed.

They found Edwin in his room, throwing a first-class tantrum, flailing on his little pirate ship bed and howling.

Elizabeth kept asking, “What’s the matter, Eddie? Do you miss Denise?”

Which only made him shriek more, because apparently, ever since Mommy had told him they were having a babysitter tonight, he had indeed been expecting Miss Denise.

Tempo peeked around Mrs. Peralta. “Know something?” she said to Edwin. “Denise was my favorite babysitter, too.”

The boy took his crying down a notch, and Mrs. Peralta turned to Tempo. “Denise Foster was your babysitter?”

Tempo kept talking to Edwin as though they were having a private session. “Did Denise ever play Confectionery with you?”

Edwin shook his head and Tempo, without mentioning Joy, told the Peraltas about the time she’d gone over to the Fosters’ house-she’d been eight then, although now she embellished and told Mrs. Peralta she’d been almost ten. Denise and Tempo had baked cookies and little cakes in Denise’s Easy Bake Oven. They’d decorated the treats with icing and sprinkles and those tiny colored marshmallows that come in Lucky Charms and then arranged everything on doilies and cut glass plates.

“Denise is an absolute goddess,” she said. Edwin nodded solemnly.

In actuality, Tempo did kind of idolize Denise, who was the sort of person who knew exactly what to do in every situation. That afternoon, for instance, by giving it a name like Confectionery, by explaining how aesthetic appeal and presentation were as important as the baking itself, Denise had turned their game of make-believe into a lesson in sophistication.

Edwin was sitting up now, bouncing, saying he wanted to play ‘fectionery. Without missing a beat, his mother said maybe later, and she told the children to go ahead and play now, she’d kiss them when she and Daddy came home that night. She smiled at Tempo, and it was like Mrs. Peralta was beaming all this positive energy into her. If at that moment Tempo had looked in the mirror, she wouldn’t have been surprised to see herself glowing from the inside.

Tempo followed her back downstairs to the kitchen, where Mrs. Peralta went over the children’s schedule for the evening.

“No phone calls out, except in an emergency,” Mrs. Peralta said. “And no friends over. Otherwise, let common sense rule.”

It was a little after six now. She beckoned for her husband, who’d just appeared, and introduced him to Tempo.

Mr. Peralta wound his tie around his neck and said, “Wow, that’s a name.”

Tempo, channeling her mother, said, “It was my dad’s idea.”

“Is your father musical?” Mrs. Peralta asked.

Tempo shook her head. “He was in love with his car.”

“Oh, you poor thing.” The woman looked simultaneously amused and genuinely sympathetic, and Tempo felt another ray of positive energy.

Mr. Peralta cinched his tie and looked Tempo over. “Small for sixteen, isn’t she, Suzie?” His wife frowned and told him not to be crude.

Tempo was blushing, and she almost died when Mr. Peralta winked at her and said, “Small for fourteen, actually.”

Mrs. Peralta slapped him hard with her purse and grabbed his arm. “One more word, and you’ll find yourself without a babysitter or a date tonight.” She tried to smile at Tempo. “I’m sorry. We’re going to leave before you decide we’re completely beneath respectability.” Tempo was still blushing as Mrs. Peralta yanked her husband out of the kitchen.

Yesterday in the hallway, Joy had told Tempo to put some Kleenex or something in her bra before she went to meet the Peraltas. Hilary Kralich and Lacey Davidson were standing right there, laughing their heads off, while Joy said without boobs, Tempo didn’t look anywhere near sixteen.

“Do you even wear a bra yet?” Hilary asked.

Tempo knew Hilary hated her guts, especially after Mrs. Carson had discovered her copying Tempo’s earth science test at the end of last year. (Hilary had also stolen Tempo’s report on President Clinton’s reelection and plagiarized from it, but nobody had found out about that yet.) Still, Joy was the one Tempo was furious with. Even if Joy were only bragging-she’d never had to stuff her bra-it still felt like a betrayal.

Joy must have sensed this, because later she told Tempo she wasn’t trying to put her down.

“But seriously, Temp,” Joy said. “The Peraltas take one look at your chest, and they’re going to think you’re not to be trusted.”

That night, Tempo had tried out Joy’s advice using a pair of socks. It startled her to look in the mirror and see those lumps in the middle of her chest. She felt the way a pregnant woman probably did, or someone with a goiter or a tumor, something that didn’t belong. With that thought, she’d canned the whole idea, although now of course she’d had to listen to Mr. Peralta’s awful comments instead. Plus she was feeling guilty all over again for lying to his wife.

*

Just as Joy had said Denise had said, Elizabeth and Edwin were a total dream. The only snag came before bedtime, when Edwin asked Tempo to take a bath with him. He just wanted her to keep him company, but still, she couldn’t help feeling supremely weird sitting there on the edge of the tub, just looking, or just trying not to look while it stared right back at her. She’d seen pictures before, naturally, but it was different seeing a penis in person. A pecker, Joy would call it. Earlier that week in study hall, Joy and company had passed around a dirty version of the Peter Piper tongue twister.

For their story, the children selected “Little Red Riding Hood,” which they were both evidently familiar with, because when Tempo got to the part where the wolf persuaded the girl to pick flowers for her grandmother, Elizabeth declared, “He’s lying,” and Edwin cried, “Bad wolf! Bad wolf!”

Tempo herself felt the wolf was just beastly (she’d always thought the hunter at the end a bit sketchy, too). She kept reading, though, and when everything turned out all right, or at least the girl and the grandmother came out alive, the children actually clapped, said good night to each other, and went to bed, just like that.

“I love you, Miss Tempo,” Edwin said, before she kissed him. It was almost enough to make Tempo want her own baby brother.

In her room, Elizabeth said she didn’t need a goodnight kiss, but she insisted Tempo sit beside her until she fell asleep, which was in about two minutes flat. Tempo felt the positive vibes zapping into her again. She sat for a little while longer watching Elizabeth, taking in the halo of light the bedside lamp put over the little girl’s head.

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Back downstairs in the library, Tempo had gotten through about a chapter and a half of her book for Honors English when someone knocked on the front door.

It was a soft tap tap tap, and that was it, as though the person already knew there were children sleeping inside. Tempo thought about the wolf in the fairy tale knocking at the grandmother’s door, which was absolutely ridiculous for sure. She told herself that maybe it was the Peraltas and they’d forgotten their key. Mrs. Peralta had said they’d be back sometime after nine. Which would make them a little early, actually. It took Tempo another minute to work up the nerve to answer the door.

It was only Joy. She giggled and waved while Tempo unlocked the door, and now Tempo discovered it wasn’t only Joy, but Hilary Kralich, too. The girls pushed their way inside.

Tempo shut the door behind them and locked it again. “You guys scared me half to death,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“Surprising you,” Joy said.

Hilary grinned and said, “Surprise!”

Tempo told the girls they couldn’t stay because Mrs. Peralta had said no friends over while she was babysitting.

“Oh.” Joy’s smile disappeared. “Fine. Then you’re not our friend.” She waited a second before she smiled again and said, “Just kidding.”

The girls brushed past Tempo and sailed down the hall toward one of the living rooms. Hilary leapt onto the squarish sofa, and Joy collapsed on the daybed, putting her feet up on the cushions and flinging her arm across her forehead like she’d swooned.

Tempo stayed back in the hallway, saying she had tons of homework, including five chapters of Catcher in the Rye. Okay, the reading was optional, and it wasn’t really her kind of book-the narrator had an attitude problem and a tendency to swear. But she wasn’t going to tell them that. She reminded them that she wasn’t allowed to have anyone over.

Hilary snorted. “Lame.”

“You’re going to get me in trouble,” Tempo said. It was ironic because she hadn’t needed to use that tone of voice all evening. “The Peraltas could be home any minute.”

Joy sat up. “When?”

Any minute, Tempo said again, and now thank God the girls were getting up and walking back toward the front of the house. Instead of leaving, however, Joy started up the staircase with Hilary bounding along right after her.

Elizabeth and Edwin were asleep, Tempo protested, and anyway it wasn’t right to go upstairs in somebody’s house unless you were invited. Joy said pshaw, like that was a word she used all the time, and Hilary shook her head and told Joy, “Oh my God, she really is a wet blanket, isn’t she?” She asked Tempo what was she was going to do, tell on them? She threatened to scream-and when Elizabeth and Edwin woke up they would see who would tell on who.

Joy said to Tempo, “I have to show you something up here.”

Tempo followed them upstairs, half afraid of what they would do if she didn’t stay with them and half curious about what there was to see. She paused in the hall between the children’s bedrooms, but Joy and Hilary continued on.

“Wait up,” Tempo whispered.

You could probably have fit Tempo’s whole apartment in the Peraltas’ bedroom suite. She could sense the size of the place even from the doorway, which opened into a sitting room, and beyond that, the main bedroom. Joy and Hilary were banging around in the bathroom.

“I can’t remember,” Joy was telling Hilary, “whether Denise said to look in the master bath or the master bedroom.”

“Denise?” Tempo watched Joy slide open the drawers under the vanity, rummaging through everything. The bathroom gleamed-the faucets, the towel bars, the handle on the toilet-as if all these tiny spotlights were being focused on Tempo.

Hilary opened a cabinet and then slammed it shut again.

“We really shouldn’t be in here,” Tempo said, as Hilary started into the Peraltas’ closet.

Joy went through a set of shelves, a formidable display of shoes, polished and stacked two by two. “She said it wasn’t even really hidden.”

“Denise?” Tempo asked again. And then: “What isn’t hidden?”

Joy ignored her. She and Hilary headed for the bedroom, leaving Tempo to straighten up and turn off the lights in the closet and the bathroom. Tempo was sure Mrs. Peralta would be the type to notice anything out of place. Returning to the sitting room, she thought she heard noises downstairs-footsteps rustling, voices calling her name. She hurried out to the hall. But there was no one.

Back in the bedroom, she told the girls she wanted to go downstairs.

Hilary smiled. “Then go, Lame-o.” Joy, searching through the drawers of the Peraltas’ bureau, didn’t answer.

Tempo stared at the back of Joy’s head. When they were little, they used to try to send each other telepathic messages on the playground, certain they could succeed if they both concentrated hard enough at the same time. Now, however, Joy was on some completely different, completely insane wavelength.

Joy crawled onto the bed and patted down the duvet. She thrust her hands under the pillows, into the pillowcases. Finding nothing, she crawled back down.

Tempo tried to smooth out the comforter. “Please.” Her throat caught on the word. “You’re going to get me in trouble.”

Joy finally looked up. “Jeez, Temp, don’t be a baby.” And then she yanked open the drawer of the nightstand and said, “Here. We. Go.”

It took Tempo a second to identify the contents of the bag Joy was holding up. The substance in the bag.

“Oh my god,” she said. “Why would the Peraltas have that?” According to every health teacher she’d ever had, marijuana was, like, really bad for you. It was toxic. It was illegal.

Joy shrugged. Everybody needed to unwind, she said. Mrs. P. was pretty uptight in case Tempo hadn’t noticed.

Hilary was jumping up and down, clapping her hands. “Maybe they need help.” She snatched the bag from Joy and beamed at Tempo. “You know, getting in the mood.”

“What mood?” Tempo asked, and then she made a face. “Gross.”

Hilary dangled the bag in front of Tempo. “Here’s a question for you, Brainiac. What do you get when you put sex and pot together?”

Tempo pushed the bag away. Joy, all wiser-than-thou, said, “Denise and Trayne would get completely randy whenever they smoked it. One time, I could smell it all the way downstairs, and I went up to Denise’s room to warn her. I saw them on the bed together. He was lying back with his pants off, while she crouched over him with her head down near his stomach. She was sucking at it.”

A wad of horror wormed its way down inside Tempo. “She was sucking at it?”

Joy laughed, and Tempo asked, “What did you do?”

“I cleared my throat and said, ‘How does it taste?’ and Trayne said, ‘Uh, Joy, we could use a little privacy.’ Denise didn’t even look up. Oh my god, it was the funniest thing ever.”

Hilary said, “A sexpot!” She giggled. “Get it?  Sex plus pot equals sexpot!”

Tempo was quiet, her brain spinning with the times Denise had played House and School with Tempo and Joy, the day she’d given Tempo a boxful of Barbies because Joy wasn’t interested in them, the afternoon of Confectionery. The memories whirled and frayed and then fell away, leaving only the picture of a girl and a boy, naked. A girl and a boy naked together-doing drugs and doing each other, as Joy would put it. She would be laughing her head off while they did each other, did that to each other.

Joy took the bag back from Hilary, and Tempo said, “Put it away, Joy. God, I’m all nauseous now. It’s disgusting.”

Hilary sneered. “Disgusting? Mrs. Peralta being a sexpot?”

Joy said, “I don’t blame her. I think Mr. P.’s pretty hot, actually.”

“Just put it away,” Tempo said.

Instead, Joy opened the bag. Tempo almost gagged on the smell. Taking three baggies out of her pocket, Joy said, “Share and share alike.” She pulled a handful of marijuana out and divided it between the baggies. She handed one baggie to Tempo and one to Hilary.

“You’re stealing it?” Tempo asked.

Joy sighed. “It’s just a little bit, Temp. They’ll never ever miss it.”

“Damn straight.” Hilary gave her bag a shake. “This is enough to roll, like, two joints. How about a little more?”

Joy shook her head. “I don’t want to risk it.”

“Risk what? They won’t know who took it.”

Tempo stared at Joy again. Obviously, the Peraltas would know who took it, or at least they would know who they thought had taken it. But why wasn’t Joy saying anything? Why wasn’t she putting the bag away? She wasn’t even looking at Tempo.

“Come on, Joy.” Hilary said. “Let’s just take the whole freaking bag while we can.”

Tempo had trouble getting her voice out. Finally, she said, “I can get more the next time I babysit.”

Joy turned.

“I’ll take a little each time,” Tempo said. “The way Denise did. I can always come back for more.”

“What if the Peraltas don’t like Tempo?” Hilary asked. “What if they don’t have her back?”

“They’ll have me back.” Tempo steadied herself. “Trust me.” She managed to sound serious and at the same time act as though it was no big deal.

Joy nodded. “That’s it, Temp. That’s my girl.” She started to put her arms around Tempo, and for a split second Tempo felt herself about to slap her friend across the face and tell her to go to hell.

But she didn’t.  She went ahead and hugged Joy, as if they were two little girls again, meeting under the monkey bars at recess, and while Joy put the rest of the marijuana back in the nightstand drawer and closed it, Tempo arranged the pillows and finished smoothing out the duvet.

*

The girls had just reached the foyer downstairs when they heard the keys being laid down on a counter, the murmuring in the back of the house. Hilary and Joy slipped out the front door. Tempo closed it behind them and locked it.

She made her way back to the kitchen. Mrs. Peralta asked how everything had gone that evening.

“Everything was fine,” Tempo said.

She wanted to tell Mrs. Peralta the truth about Joy and Hilary and the marijuana. She wanted to tell her about Denise. About herself.

The woman paid her. Tempo put the money in her pocket, slipping the bills behind her plastic baggie. She fingered the baggie for a moment.

Finally, she said to Mrs. Peralta, “I think I forgot something.”

She hurried upstairs and raced back down the hall to the master suite. In the doorway, she paused, feeling as if she really had forgotten something, or lost something. Then she dashed into the bedroom, put her baggie into the drawer with the Peraltas’ stash of weed, and hurried back out.

At the stairs, she met Mr. Peralta.

“Tempo, ma Cherie.”

He came close to her, so close she could smell the wine on his breath, feel the warmth on her forehead. She stood still as his hand brushed the top of her head.

“I hope we see more of you very soon,” he said.

It would still be some years before Tempo would come to understand that she was like a little boy playing with matches when she whispered, “I think you’re pretty hot, Mr. P.”

His hand jerked back, and then froze. It hung in the space between them, as if it were something separate from him. She stared at his hand, and then stared at him staring at it. He wouldn’t look at her.

The hall light came on, and Mrs. Peralta appeared. “Is everything all right?”

Mr. Peralta laughed, a phony kind of laugh. “Tempo was just saying good night to the children,” he said.

After a pause, Tempo nodded. “I promised Elizabeth.”

In her room, Elizabeth was sleeping, her perfect face angled slightly away from the light, just as it was when Tempo had left her. Tempo reached out, as if to pet the girl. She sensed the Peraltas hovering in the hallway behind her.

When Mrs. Peralta called the next day, or over the weekend, or the following week, it wouldn’t matter whether Tempo lied or didn’t. Mrs. Peralta would know. Not everything, but she would know enough to understand Tempo wasn’t such a goody-goody after all. Maybe she would think she wasn’t to be trusted. Maybe she would think she wasn’t mature enough. Maybe she wasn’t, maybe she was.

Tempo turned off the bedside lamp.

Bryan Shawn Wang grew up a few miles from the King of Prussia mall and now lives with his wife and children in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. A former biochemist, he teaches biology and chemistry at local colleges. His fiction has recently appeared, and is forthcoming, in Rathalla Review, The Summerset Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and Kenyon Review Online.

 

“The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men. It is not a problem of physics, but of ethics. It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man.”

                                    Albert Einstein

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The tears began to stream down my face as I watched him play and I didn’t even care if the degenerates who were there with me saw it and made fun of me for it later.  There was something so beautiful, so perfect about the performance that it made me not care.  It was Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto Number 2.  Usually I didn’t go in for Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake and The Nutcracker were too fruity for me.  I was more into the sterner Teutonic fare like Beethoven and Wagner.  But this piece had some bite to it, unlike the Tchaikovsky to which public radio had accustomed me.

The pianist was in a league of his own.  He was a curly-haired, doughy-faced Russian guy in his late twenties-not that much older than me.  More than simply getting the notes right, he played with a flair, a flourish, that was mesmerizing.  I knew nothing about pianists, but I had to think that this guy was among the top five or ten in the world.  I simply could not imagine ten people who could be better at it than him.  Maybe that got to me, too-seeing a true genius at work.  It’s not often one gets an opportunity to do that.  But, then again, perhaps the cause of my tears was that all of the counseling the courts had forced me to undergo had just made me soft.

*

In the 1930s, scientists learned that nuclear reactions could be both initiated and controlled.  It began with a large isotope (a misleading term because it’s actually one of the smallest particles of matter in existence), usually of Uranium-235 or Plutonium-239 because of their ability to produce an excess of neutrons.  Scientists bombarded this isotope with a smaller isotope, typically a neutron.  The collisions then caused the larger isotope to break down into two or more smaller elements.  Using Einstein’s equivalence principle, it was possible to accurately predict how much energy would be produced by this nuclear fission.

*

The story of how I’d gotten to be in that matinee audience at Heinz Hall was a cautionary tale from which it was unlikely anyone would ever learn anything, least of all me.  During what was supposed to be my junior year of college, I’d gotten involved with the “wrong crowd.”  Of course, that’s a relative term, depending solely on one’s perspective.  They were the “wrong” crowd if one desired to accomplish anything of value in life, or to stay out of jail.  They were the right crowd, however, if one’s goal was to obtain narcotics with which to get high.  At the time I met this crowd, that was the driving force in my life-my raison d’être.  It hasn’t escaped me that if an opiate represents one’s reason to, well, ‘être, then one doesn’t have much to live for.  I didn’t.  As far as I’m concerned, in spite of what my judge and counselors have tried to tell me, I still don’t.

I had help getting in with that wrong crowd.  My accomplice’s name was Mia.  Not much of a name for a femme fatale, but she wasn’t much of a femme fatale.  She was thin, short hair, kind of pale.  Put pointy plastic ears on her and she could’ve passed for an elf.  Not a Keebler Elf, more like those mischievous pixies in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Of course, I was no leading man, either: too short and thin through the chest and shoulders.  Mia and I attended the same college and met one night during our junior year at some douchebag frat party.  It was a pretty big university and our majors were in different departments-I was school of science while she was studying art history-so I couldn’t recall ever having seen her before.  I had just enough beer in me that night to approach her when her female friend disappeared momentarily. Walking up to her, I asked: “Can I buy you a beer?”

“They’re free,” she replied.

“All the better.”

She smiled and shook her head: “I don’t drink that swill.  I’m only here because my friend was hoping to see some guy.  More of a hairdo than a guy but, whatever.  He didn’t show so we’re heading to a party thrown by some art students.  Care to tag along?”

A simple truth of human existence is that almost everything bad that happens to us, we cause ourselves.  Sure, Job was God’s punching bag.  But for the rest of us, those whom the Old Testament Jehovah didn’t decide to use as subjects of social experiments, we bring about most of our problems through the choices we make, whether it’s smoking cigarettes, driving too fast, having unsafe sex, or whatever.  There are lots of little steps along the path to our downfall that if we would’ve only pulled back, or veered off in some way, we may have been able to avoid it completely.  Granted, we’re all going to go down in the end.  But plenty of us go out of our way to expedite that process.  I didn’t know it at the time-one rarely does-but this was the first step on the way to my demise, and I leaped on it with both feet.

*

I peered to each side to see if anyone from my group had taken note of my tears.  There were five of us in total, plus one counselor from the halfway house there to chaperone us.  I was situated in the middle.  The two guys to my left, Gerald and LaRon, were sleeping.  Gerald had his head tilted back and a river of drool flowed out of the corner of his mouth; LaRon was snoring-loudly.  To my immediate right, Ty was playing Angry Birds on his iPod Touch.  Beside him I could see that Walter’s attention was completely consumed by his unsuccessful struggle to hold in the farts from the Mexican food we’d had for lunch.  God bless him for trying.  Mike, the counselor, was the only one in our group aside from me paying attention to the concert.

With the exception of Walter, who’d gotten popped for his fifth DUI and was in his mid-forties with a wife and kids at home, the rest of us, including Mike, were all in our twenties.  Aside from Walter, we were all first-time offenders, arrested on drug-related charges.  Since none of us had committed violent crimes, the courts system had sent us to a halfway house rather than jail.  That was a gigantic relief to me because even though I’d done everything I could to kill brain cells I was still quite protective of my rectum.  The program supervisor at the halfway house, a graying former hippy who was clinging to some misguided faith in humanity, had arranged for us to attend this matinee with the hope that the exposure to culture would somehow elevate us.  As I surveyed the sea of white hair in evening gowns, suits and tuxedos filling the ornate concert hall, I thought it much more likely that we would bring the rest of the crowd down, rather than being uplifted ourselves.  It’s not that any of us were evil.  Speaking personally, I wasn’t as good as Jesus, Mother Teresa, or Princess Di, but then again I wasn’t so bad as Hitler, Charles Manson or Walt Disney.  What we were was misguided and weak-losers, if one insists on reducing the subject to binary thinking

*

They used to call it splitting atoms, though that wasn’t really an accurate description of the process.  The enormous amount of energy released during nuclear fission is caused by matter being converted into energy.  If the masses of all the atoms and sub-atomic particles the process begins with are measured against the masses of the subatomic particles that remain after the process is completed, it is apparent that some mass is “missing.”  Depending on if the reactions are controlled, enough energy can be released to either power or destroy an entire city.  While the atomic bomb isn’t grounded upon Einstein’s E = mc², it does cogently illustrate his theorem.  Energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared.  Neutrons colliding with atoms and worlds are destroyed…

*

People say opposites attract.  That is true when it comes to chemistry where protons and electrons exert a pull on one another that holds together the nucleus of an atom.  But when it comes to human chemistry the most elementary intro psych textbook will insist that like attracts like.  That was our problem: at core, we were too similar.  Even though Mia was a right-brain art student, and I was a left-brain physics major, at the core we shared more or less the same strengths and weaknesses.  Not proton and electron, but more like neutron and neutron-two common fissile isotopes thrown together by the life’s nuclear reactor.

It was Mia who first introduced me to weed, then blow, and finally junk.  I bounded over the various gateway drugs like an Olympic hurdler.  We both had holes to fill.  The crater that Mia was trying to seal was the aftermath of something bad that had happened to her as a kid, something that she would never talk about.  Whatever it was, it affected her outlook.  It’s funny because even though her behavior and the things she said would’ve gotten her burned for a witch back in the Pilgrims’ days, she nevertheless shared the Puritans’ outlook on humankind, thinking that everyone was essentially evil at bottom.  Like the Puritans, she believed that evil should be scourged away, only instead of using a hair-shirt and cattail whip, she employed heroin and cocaine.  My situation was different.  Aside from my parents divorcing when I was eleven, I’d had a pretty standard, trauma-free upbringing.  When my father left, my mother placed all her hopes for the future squarely on my shoulders.  It was a heavy burden for a eleven year old to bear-and it hadn’t gotten any lighter by the time I was twenty-one. 

*

I glanced at my program.  The orchestra had progressed into the second movement: the Andante non troppo.  The pianist was really getting into it.  His curls were flapping in the air as he jerked his head about violently with each note.  I was amazed at how high he lifted his hands above the keyboard before bringing them crashing back down again, while always striking the correct notes.  I recalled when I had taken piano lessons as a kid-I was hesitant to remove my fingers from the keys for fear of losing my place.  But this guy was a maestro.  He literally could’ve played with his eyes closed.  I glanced over at Mike to give him an appreciative nod and caught him with his index finger buried to the first knuckle in his right nostril.

*

Nuclear fuel contains millions of times the amount of free energy contained in a similar amount of chemical fuel, like gasoline.  The earliest fission bombs, for instance the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs that were dropped on the Japanese cities Nagasaki and Hiroshima, were thousands of times more explosive than a comparable mass of conventional weapons.  Modern nuclear weapons are hundreds of times more powerful for their weight than these first pure fission atomic bombs.  All of this is brought about by the collision of particles of matter so small that they cannot be seen, even using an electron microscope which is able to produce magnifications of up to about 10,000,000 times. 

 

While he was not directly involved in the Manhattan Project, one year before his death Einstein revealed that he considered the one great mistake he’d made in life to have been signing the letter to F.D.R. recommending that the construction of the atom bomb be undertaken.  The justification was the danger that the Germans would devise one first.  Robert Oppenheimer, the leading physicist in the Manhattan Project, later commented that after seeing the first nuclear bomb tested in New Mexico in 1945 a line had come to him from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”  Neutrons and atoms colliding.  Mere isotopes.  Destroyers of worlds.

*

At first I spent the money my mother sent me to live off of to buy drugs.  But once Mia and I had gotten hooked, the money dried up quickly.  So we dropped out of classes (we’d both stopped going anyway) and used the refunded tuition.  But that didn’t last long.  We started selling stuff: books, televisions, computers, even clothes.  Eventually, we ran out of things to sell and we were left with two choices (technically, I suppose, it was three, but at the time neither of us really considered quitting an option):  we could either steal or turn tricks.  We chose stealing as the lesser of two evils.  Before I’d gotten involved in drugs I wouldn’t have known how to go about becoming a thief.  But one good thing about being in a drug community is that it exposes a person to some pretty unsavory characters.  In retrospect, it’s probably not all that good of a thing after all, but it comes in handy when searching for accomplices.

Garbage was a former biker we’d met at a house where people used.  Neither Mia nor I had any idea what was his real name might have been and we didn’t really care.  Everyone called him Garbage and that was good enough for us because, in the end, it was better not to know too much about people.  Anyway, he looked like a “Garbage”-big and hairy with a complete lack of personal hygiene.  When we encountered him at the flop house, we’d just sold Mia’s easel and the last of her paints and canvases in order to score.  I was in the process of coming up into lucidity enough to talk when I noticed him on the couch beside us.  I had no clue as to how long he’d been there.  From the look of his eyes, I could tell he was in about the same state as me, so I told him we were looking for a way to scare up some cash that didn’t involve any of our orifices.  He said: “You’re in luck.  I have a little ‘business’ and I recently lost my partner.”

“Did he get pinched?” I asked.

“No, no.”

“Dead?”

“No, nothing like that.  I mean I lost him.  I literally lost him.  He got an insurance settlement for fifty large for a slip and fall at WalMart and we cashed the check and drove down to New Orleans.  I lost track of him somewhere in the French Quarter on the third or fourth day.  Had to hitchhike the whole way home alone.”

“Oh.  So you guys did insurance scams?”

“Naw, that was on the up-and-up.  We were into precious metal extraction.”

I stared at him blankly and he added: “We steal copper pipes from abandoned houses.”

*

[img_assist|nid=10576|title=Elephant at Large by Lesley Mitchell © 2013|desc=|link=node|align=none|width=500|height=372]

Mike glared at Ty until he finally stopped playing his game and glanced up.  An annoyed look tightening his face, Mike nodded for Ty to put the iPod away.  Ty clucked his tongue and made a disgusted “Tcch” sound that drew the attention of several of the blue hairs seated nearby.  Jamming the phone into the hip pocket of his jeans, Ty turned to me for moral support in his confrontation.  Seeing my tear-streaked face, his eyes became wide.  I would definitely hear about this later, but I didn’t care.  The orchestra had progressed to the final movement-the Allegro con fuoco, and I was completely enthralled.  I was unsure what was eliciting this visceral reaction from me, and I didn’t care.  When confronted with true beauty, it’s best not to question it too much because the mystery of its existence is half of its allure. 

I made a mental note to find this piece on the ‘net using the computer at the halfway house so that I could download it onto my iPod.  Technically, iPods were contraband in the halfway house, but we all had them and the counselors pretty much all knew it.  The program the court had placed me in had some manual labor for us to perform, and lots of counseling, but those could only fill up so many hours.  The rest of my “rehabilitation” was spent watching Jerry Springer, listening to my housemates argue over video games, and staring at the ceiling reliving over and over again everything that happened.  My parents phoned almost every night-my mother, anyway.  My father had gotten remarried and started another family years ago.  When I first got arrested, I think he decided to place all of his eggs in that basket.  I didn’t take my mother’s calls most of the time.  When I did she always wanted to talk about what I’d do when I got out-going back to school and all.  I played along, but the truth was I didn’t care about the future anymore.

*

When fission occurs with U-235, one neutron is used, but three neutrons are produced.  If these three neutrons encounter other U-235 atoms, other fissions can be initiated, producing yet more neutrons.  In layman’s terms, it is the domino effect in action.  This continuing cascade of nuclear fissions is called a chain reaction.  One becomes three.  Three becomes nine.  Nine becomes eighty-one.  Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds…

*

Mia volunteered to come along and help with the “job.”  She thought it would be an adventure.  Garbage didn’t mind because he said it would be another set of hands; I think he had a thing for her.  Plus he’d already made it clear that he would get two-thirds of the take whether it was just me or both of us, so it wasn’t any money out of his pocket.  He borrowed an old, beat-up van that, from the look of it, had probably been involved in some abductions at some point.  He’d found a house out in the suburbs of Monroeville that he insisted was vacant.  We arrived late on a foggy night, parked the van in the driveway and did a quick reconnaissance of the place.  It was a one-story, ranch-style with a small, neat yard.  Peering through a window, I could see there was a minimal amount of furniture and no clutter just sitting around, as though the owners had already moved out, or were in the process of doing so.

The front and back doors were locked, so we walked around the side and Garbage kicked in a window with one of his enormous, steel-toed biker boots.  Then he told me: “Climb in there and go open the back door for us.”

Observing the pile of broken glass on the floor, and the jagged remaining edges of the window still clinging menacingly to the panes, I stepped back and mumbled: “Why me?”

Garbage looked cross, and snapped, “Because I’m too goddam big and you don’t want your little girlfriend getting cut up on that broken glass.  Do ya, bud?”

I frowned and muttered, “Okay.”  Then I climbed gingerly through the window, avoiding most of the shards of glass scattered across the floor.  I made my way to the back door double-quick because I suddenly had visions in my head of that smelly oaf Garbage ravishing Mia against the aluminum siding.  She’d gotten high before we left, and I didn’t think she was in any condition to fend him off.

When I got to the door, they were waiting.  Garbage smirked, “Good job, bud,” and gave me a patronizing pat on the cheek.  I would’ve liked to have socked him in his ugly mush, but I’d never hit anyone in my life and I didn’t think he was the right person to start with. 

We negotiated a rickety set of narrow wooden steps down to the basement.  It was finished, but most of the furniture had been removed, which was lucky because I was tripping all over myself until we found the light switch.  Garbage located the laundry room and Mia and I followed him in.  Seeing several copper pipes running along the drop ceiling, he exclaimed: “Pay dirt!”

While Mia walked around the little room, humming to herself and picking up and examining the various odds and ends, I asked Garbage, “What now?”

He dropped the Army surplus rucksack filled with tools that he’d carried in with him.   As he bent over to open it, his leather jacket pulled above his waist, revealing the top third of the crack of his hairy ass.  Rifling through the rucksack, he removed a plumber’s wrench which he handed to me.  Nodding at a plastic patio chair in the corner, he said: “Why don’t you climb up on that chair, little fella, and see if you can’t loosen them pipes in the corner.”

“What’re you going to do?”

He answered me by producing a power saw from the canvas bag, plugging it into an outlet on the wall and giving it a test squeeze.  As it buzzed to life, a twinkle of demented glee filled his bloodshot eyes.

*

As the Allegro con fuoco was rising to its final crescendo, the tears continued to stream down my face.  I started thinking about genius.  The Russian pianist was obviously a genius, but his genius lay in interpretation, not creation.  Tchaikovsky, the composer, had created the music.  He’d made something-something sublime-that had never existed before, could not have existed were it not for him.  Even Einstein had never really done that.  Einstein merely commented on things that already existed.  Of course, they were things nobody else would have been able to see.  The rest of us are surrounded by these things-they’re the sheet music of the universe-but we’re completely incapable of reading the notes.  It takes an oddball genius like Einstein to decipher those notes from out of the very ether and play it out for all of humanity.

Einstein had a great love of music, and was a gifted and enthusiastic musician.  I’d read that he’d once asserted: “Life without playing music is inconceivable for me.” His second wife, Elsa, claimed to have fallen in love with him because he’d performed Mozart on the violin so beautifully.  In addition to Mozart, he’d revered Bach, and admired but didn’t love Beethoven.  I’m not sure what his thoughts were on Tchaikovsky, but I have to think that if iPods had existed in his time, Einstein would have had Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto Number 2 on it. 

Einstein was my hero-the reason I’d pursued physics.  I even had a poster of him hanging on the wall in my old bedroom in my mother’s house.  But that was all gone now.  As a convicted felon, I could never get the clearances necessary to work in nuclear physics.  But maybe, deep down, that’s what I’d wanted all along.  If Einstein was Mozart, then I was Salieri.  Hell, I wasn’t even Salieri; I was the organ-grinder out on the street playing for spare change.  No, I wasn’t even that.  I was the organ-grinder’s monkey, capable of nothing more than capering about drunkenly and holding up a tin cup for alms. 

*

On the development of nuclear technology, Einstein had remarked: “Since I do not foresee that atomic energy is to be a great boon for a long time, I have to say that for the present it is a menace. Perhaps it is well that it should be. It may intimidate the human race into bringing order into its international affairs, which, without the pressure of fear, it would not do.”  You can’t be right all of the time…

*

It had been a few minutes and I was still working on that first pipe joint.  Since I had taken college-prep courses in high school, I’d only had shop in middle school and had been lousy at it then.  I was better with my mind than my hands-at least, I had been.  While I was struggling with the joint, I overheard Garbage finish sawing through his first pipe.  I looked over in time to see the two ends of the pipe separate and one end begin spurting water like a geyser.  “Shit!” Garbage exclaimed, stepping away from the gushing water and switching off the power saw.  “I can’t believe they left the frickin’ water on!”

Mia clapped her hands delightedly.  Kicking off her sandals, she began to dance under the shower of water spewing from the breached pipe, humming the melody to: “Singing in the Rain.” 

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“What do you think, Einstein?” Garbage snapped.  “We find the main water valve and shut it off.”

“Where would that be?” I asked, not budging from my perch on the chair.

“If I knew that, I would’ve already turned it off, genius.” 

That was clearly disingenuous: he was flummoxed.  His partner, the guy who ditched him in the French Quarter, apparently had been the brains of their operation.  Garbage was the muscle-a pack mule capable of grunting out a few words.  He had opposable digits, but aside from allowing him to shoot up, I could see that they provided him not much more benefit than an orangutan wanking himself in the zoo.  I didn’t like hearing Einstein’s name on the lips of that ape, and still stinging from his earlier jibes, I responded without really thinking: “I’m not the savant who cut a water pipe before checking to see if the water was on.  I thought you knew what you were doing.”

Mia seemed completely unaware of our confrontation.  She raised her hands in the air and spun around like she was at a Phish concert.  The water was rushing out at such a rapid rate, and the laundry room was so small and enclosed that the water on the floor had already risen to her ankles.  I could see from the glint in his eyes that Garbage had found a convenient scapegoat for his mistake: “You’ve got a lot to say, don’t you?”

“No,” I tried to backpedal a little, realizing there was no one there to pull that gorilla off of me in case he attacked, “I’m just saying, you know, we need to do something.”

“I am going to do something,” Garbage replied, flicking the power saw back on.  It whirred to life with a menacing whine.  “I’m going to give you a lobotomy from the neck, you intellectual asshole.”

He began to slowly approach me, holding the saw up at shoulder level like a handgun.  He’d gotten about halfway across the tiny room when we heard from outside the door: “This is the police!  Whoever is in there, come out right now with your hands where we can see them.”

Garbage froze in his tracks, and spun his head to look over his shoulder in the direction of the voice.  When he did so, Mia, who was still dancing-too high to process what was happening-bounced into Garbage, causing him to drop the saw.  The saw hit the water and made a loud, crackling noise.  Mia’s back was to me, but I don’t think she ever had any idea what hit her.  Her body began convulsing.  The lights had already cut out when I heard her crash to the floor, splashing water into my face.  Garbage’s face I did see.  We locked eyes just before the saw hit the water.  He had a look in his eyes like he’d just stepped in dog crap; I don’t think he fully comprehended what was about to happen because he didn’t seem terrified at all.  Maybe he was a little high, too.  The electrical surge from the saw hitting the water caused a fuse to blow, so I only had to watch a few seconds of it.  Sitting in that plastic chair had protected me.  For once in my life I was grounded.

The cop who’d yelled moments earlier, shouted through the door again. His index finger probably caressing the trigger of his gun, he sounded a little spooked: “What the hell just happened in there?”

I explained.  They shut off the water and the main circuit breaker to the house, just to be safe, before coming to retrieve me.  I wouldn’t get out of that chair, though, until one of the cops had splashed through the water to yank me out of it.  I was in jail when Mia’s family had her funeral back in Johnstown, where she’d grown up.  It was probably just as well that I couldn’t go.  They wouldn’t have wanted me there.  I’m sure they blamed me for her death.  I blamed me and I knew the truth of the situation.  At least, the truth as I saw it.  We were inconsequential.  Isotopes too small to notice.  But when we collided, one split into three and we released enough energy to destroy two worlds.  They were small worlds, to be sure, but they were the only worlds either of them had.

*

The pianist banged out those last triumphant notes and the crowd broke into raucous cheering, shooting to their feet as though pulled up by some cosmic puppeteer.  The tears continued to stream down my face as I followed suit.  Einstein once said: “Solutions are easy.  The real difficulty lies in discovering the problem.”  But how are we supposed to discover the problem when it lies within ourselves-sewn into the fabric of our being at the subatomic level?  Neutrons colliding with atoms until eventually worlds are destroyed.  Whatever problems Mia and Garbage may have suffered from had been solved when that power saw hit the water in which they were standing. 

And me?  My problem was I needed a fix.

 

Stephen Graf is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He holds a Masters Degrees from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and Trinity College, Dublin, a PhD in British Literature from the University of Newcastle in England, and he currently teaches at Robert Morris University. Among other places, he has been published in: AIM Magazine, Cicada, The Southern Review, The Chrysalis Reader, Fiction, The Minnetonka Review, New Works Review, SNReview, The Willow Review, The Wisconsin Review, and The Black Mountain Review in Ireland. His short story “Hadamard’s Billiards” was awarded an Honorable Mention for the 2012 Pushcart Prize.