Whether anybody was home meant everything to a house. It was more than a major fact: it was the only fact.
The family was the house’s soul.
The waking mind was like the light in a house.
The soul was like the gopher in his hole.
Consciousness was to brain as family was to house.
Aristotle: Suppose the eye were an animal — sight would be its soul.
To understand the mind you pictured domestic activity, the hum of related lives on varied tracks, the hearth’s fundamental glow. You spoke of “presence” and “clutter” and “occupation.” Or, conversely, of “vacancy” and “shutting down.” Of “disturbance.”
Maybe the futile light in a house with three people separately absorbed in the basement and only one upstairs, a little boy staring at a plate of cold food, was like the mind of a depressed person.
Gary was the first to tire of the basement. He surfaced and skirted the too-bright dining room, as if it held the victim of a sickening disfigurement, and went up to the second floor to brush his teeth.
Enid followed soon with seven warm white shirts. She, too, skirted the dining room. She reasoned that if the problem in the dining room was her responsibility then she was horrendously derelict in not resolving it, and a loving mother could never be so derelict, and she was a loving mother, so the responsibility must not have been hers. Eventually Alfred would surface and see what a beast he’d been and be very, very sorry. If he had the nerve to blame her for the problem, she could say: “You’re the one who said he had to sit there till he ate it.”
While she ran a bath she tucked Gary into bed. “Always be my little lion,” she said.
“OK.”
“Is he fewocious? Is he wicious? Is he my wicious wittle wion?”
Gary didn’t answer these questions. “Mom,” he said.
“Chipper is still at the table, and it’s almost nine.”
“That’s between Dad and Chipper.”
“Mom? He really doesn’t like those foods. He’s not just pretending.”
“I’m so glad you’re a good eater,” Enid said.
“Mom, it’s not really fair.”
“Sweetie, this is a phase your brother’s going through. It’s wonderful you’re so concerned, though. It’s wonderful to be so loving. Always be so loving.”
She hurried to stop the water and immerse herself.
In a dark bedroom next door Chuck Meisner imagined, going inside her, that Bea was Enid. As he chugged to ejaculation he was trading.
He wondered if any exchange had a market in Erie Belt options. Buy five thousand shares outright with thirty puts for a downside hedge. Or better, if someone offered him a rate, a hundred naked calls.
She was pregnant and trading up in cup size, A to Β and eventually even C, Chuck guessed, by the time the baby came. Like some municipality’s bond rating in a tailspin.
One by one the lights of St. Jude were going out.
And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.
As if sustained and too-direct contact with time’s raw passage could scar the nerves permanently, like staring at the sun.
As if too-intimate knowledge of any interior were necessarily harmful knowledge. Were knowledge that could never be washed off.
(How weary, how worn, a house lived in to excess.)
Chipper heard things and saw things but they were all in his head. After three hours, the objects surrounding him were as drained of flavor as old bubble gum. His mental states were strong by comparison and overwhelmed them. It would have taken an effort of will, a reawakening, to summon the term “place mat” and apply it to the visual field that he had observed so intensely that its reality had dissolved in the observing, or to apply the word “furnace” to the rustle in the ducts which in its recurrence had assumed the character of an emotional state or an actor in his imagination, an embodiment of Evil Time. The faint fluctuations in the light as someone ironed and someone played and someone experimented and the refrigerator cycled on and off had been part of the dream. This changefulness, though barely noticeable, had been a torment. But it had stopped now.
Now only Alfred remained in the basement. He probed a gel of ferroacetates with the electrodes of an ammeter.
A late frontier in metallurgy: custom-formation of metals at room temperature. The Grail was a substance which could be poured or molded but which after treatment (perhaps with an electrical current) had steel’s superior strength and conductivity and resistance to fatigue. A substance easy like plastic and hard like metal.
The problem was urgent. A cultural war was being waged, and the forces of plastic were winning. Alfred had seen jam and jelly jars with plastic lids. Cars with plastic roofs.
Unfortunately, metal in its free state — a nice steel stake or a solid brass candlestick — represented a high level of order, and Nature was slatternly and preferred disorder. The crumble of rust. The promiscuity of molecules in solution. The chaos of warm things. States of disorder were vastly more likely to arise spontaneously than were cubes of perfect iron. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, much work was required to resist this tyranny of the probable — to force the atoms of a metal to behave themselves.
Alfred was sure that electricity was equal to this work. The current that came through the grid amounted to a borrowing of order from a distance. At power plants an organized piece of coal became a flatulence of useless warm gases; an elevated and self-possessed reservoir of water became entropic runoff wandering toward a delta. Such sacrifices of order produced the useful segregation of electrical charges that he put to work at home.
He was seeking a material that could, in effect, electroplate itself. He was growing crystals in unusual materials in the presence of electric currents.
It wasn’t hard science but the brute probabilism of trial and error, a groping for accidents that he might profit from. One college classmate of his had already made his first million with the results of a chance discovery.
That he might someday not have to worry about money: it was a dream identical to the dream of being comforted by a woman, truly comforted, when the misery overcame him.
The dream of radical transformation: of one day waking up and finding himself a wholly different (more confident, more serene) kind of person, of escaping that prison of the given, of feeling divinely capable.
He had clays and gels of silicate. He had silicone putties. He had slushy ferric salts succumbing to their own deliquescence. Ambivalent acetylacetonates and tetracarbonyls with low melting points. A chunk of gallium the size of a damson plum.
The head chemist at the Midland Pacific, a Swiss Ph.D. bored into melancholy by a million measurements of engine-oil viscosity and Brinell hardness, kept Alfred in supplies. Their superiors were aware of the arrangement — Alfred would never have risked getting caught in something underhanded — and it was informally understood that if he ever came up with a patentable process, the Midpac would get a share of any proceeds.
Tonight something unusual was happening in the ferro-acetate gel. His conductivity readings varied wildly, depending on where exactly he stuck the ammeter’s probe. Thinking the probe might be dirty, he switched to a narrow needle with which he again poked the gel. He got a reading of no conductivity at all. Then he stuck the gel in a different place and got a high reading.