I have no memory of her ever saying she loved me, although she did give me a stiff hug around the neck at the airport and reminded me that contraception was my responsibility, not the responsibility of my future dates. She was killed in June of 1993 by members of the Lord’s Resistance Army, on a mountain road along the northwestern border of the Congo. She died with her French lover, the man with whom she had lived, it turned out, for most of a decade. Her death made the New York Times.
My father absorbed the news in the same way he’d responded to the space shuttle Challenger disaster—gravely, but with no great sign of personal grief. I could not tell you if they ever loved each other or what led them to make a baby together. That is a mystery greater than anything concerning Shelly Beukes and the Phoenician. I will say that as far as I know, my father had no woman in his life in all the years when they were apart, first when they were separated by Africa and later when they were divided by her death.
And he read her books. Every one. He kept them on the shelf right below the photo albums.
My father lived to see me graduate from MIT and return to the West Coast to pursue my master’s (and then my Ph.D.) at Caltech. He died the week before I turned twenty-two. A live subtransmission line let go on a wet and windy night and caught him across the back where he stood at the side of the repair van, collecting his toolbox. He was nailed with 138 kilovolts.
I went into the twenty-first century alone, an angry orphan who resented it whenever people my age bitched about their parents (“My mom is pissed because I don’t want to study law,” “My dad fell asleep at my graduation”—blah, blah, blah). But then I also resented people who didn’t complain about their parents but spoke of them with affection (“My mom says she doesn’t care what I do as long as I’m happy,” “My dad still calls me Little Trooper”—blah, blah, blah).
There is no system of measurement that can adequately quantify how much resentment I carried in my heart when I was young and lonely. My sense of personal grievance ate me like cancer, hollowed me out, left me gaunt and wasted. When I set off for MIT at eighteen, I weighed 330 pounds. Six years later I was a buck-seventy. It wasn’t exercise. It was fury. Resentment is a form of starvation. Resentment is the hunger strike of the soul.
I spent most of a musty, stultifying April vacation clearing out the house in Cupertino, boxing up clothes and chipped dinner plates to bring to Goodwill, delivering books to the library. That spring the pollen was heavy, coating the windows with a bright yellow haze. Anyone who had come into the house would’ve found me with tears dripping off the end of my nose and assumed it was grief when really it was allergies. Packing up the house where I’d lived out my entire childhood was a surprisingly dispassionate business. With our generic furniture sets and our inoffensive striped wallpaper, we had left almost no mark on the place at all.
I had genuinely forgotten about the weird plate of steel shoved to the rear of my closet until I reached back there and put my hand on it. It was still in its garbage bag, but I could feel the bulges and planes of the metal through the plastic. I lifted it out and held the wrapped bundle in both hands for a long time, in a heavy, suspenseful silence, the sort of silence that settles on the world in the moments before a hard summer thundershower breaks.
That whispering iron never spoke to me again—not in my waking thoughts anyway. Sometimes it spoke to me in dreams, though. Sometimes, in dreams, I saw it as it had been when it first spilled out of the crushed Solarid: a tarry liquid with an eyeball in it, a weird thinking protoplasm that didn’t belong in our reality.
I had one dream in which I found myself sitting across the dinner table from my father. He was dressed for work, staring down into a bowl of purple Panama Thrill, the Jell-O quivering and jiggling uneasily in its dish.
Aren’t you going to have some dessert? I asked.
He looked up, and his eyes were yellow, with cat’s-eye pupils. In a strained, unhappy voice, he said, I can’t. I think I’m going to be sick. And then he opened his mouth and began to vomit onto the table, gouts of that black goop coming out of him in a slow, sticky gush. Bringing with it a hiss of static and a babble of madness.
In my final years at Caltech, I began to develop the architecture for a new sort of memory system, crafting an integrated circuit board the size of a credit card. My prototype leaned heavily on components crafted out of that grotesque, impossible metal and it achieved computational effects that I’m sure have never been matched, not in any lab, anywhere, by anyone. That first board was my Africa, was to me what the Congo had been to my mother: a splendid alien country where all the colors were brighter and where every new day of study promised some fresh, thrilling revelation. I lived there for years. I never wanted to come back. I had nothing to come back to. Not in those days.
Then the work was done. Ultimately I found I could get impressive, if less remarkable results, by employing certain rare-earth metals: ytterbium mostly, and cerium. It wasn’t anything like what I could do with the whispering iron, but it still represented a major leap forward in the field. I was noticed by a company named after a crisp and juicy fruit and signed a contract that made me a millionaire on the spot. If you have three thousand songs and a thousand photos on your phone, you’re probably carrying some of my work in your pocket.
I’m the reason your computer remembers everything you don’t.
No one has to forget anything anymore. I made sure of it.
21
SHELLY HAS BEEN GONE FOR more than a quarter of a century now. I lost her, my mother, and my father before I turned twenty-five. None of them saw me marry. None of them ever had a chance to meet my two boys. Every year I give away as much money as my father earned in his entire lifetime, and I am still far richer than any man has any right to be. I have had an indecent share of happiness, although I confess most of it only came after I was no longer mentally able to keep up with the latest breakthroughs in computer science. I am a professor emeritus at the company I signed with out of Caltech, which is a nice way of saying they only keep me around out of nostalgia. I haven’t made a significant contribution in my field for over a decade. That weird, impossible alloy has long since been all used up. The same goes for me.