The Periodic Table

 
“Don’t you have anything better to do?” said my roommate.  I was at the kitchen table studying the Periodic Table of Elements.  The Periodic Table painted on my bedroom ceiling had kept me awake seven nights.  The guy living in the room before me had left it.  I didn’t know his name.  I thought if I did know it I might get some closure.
Mitch scratched his abdomen.  Thoroughly.  I thought how more things should be arranged in tables, with neat separations between night and day, childhood and adulthood, one person and the next.  But even the elements don’t stay in their boxes.  They react, form compounds, create and break bonds, release heat, transfer energy.  Restless as people, relentlessly seeking both equilibrium and upset, draining one of sleep.
From a textbook I had photocopied a list of the symbols and names of the 104 elements.  My thought was if I memorized them I would get some closure and some sleep, because the Table is all about closure and nomenclature and rest.
Mitch turned his back. I’d known him for two days.  Already I knew the three aspects of his character that mattered:
1)      Bluntness;
2)      Uncleanliness;
3)  A suburban-Aryan-golden-boy style beauty.
“I’m a chem major,” I said.
“You have the Norton’s Anthology of English Literature on the coffee table.”
“I’m switching.”
“Shouldn’t you be reading Beowulf or Catcher in the Rye?”
“I have.”
He took a skillet out of the fridge, sniffed it, slammed it on the stove.
“You’re not a clean man, Mitch.”
“I’ve got my priorities straight is why.”
Priorities.  Boron.  Radon.  Chlorine.  Fluorine.
I preferred the ine to the on elements.  The ilium ones weren’t bad either.
“Want some eggs?”
“No, thanks.”
“You gotta eat.”
“I did.”
“Your cupboards are empty.”
He turned back to the stove as the skillet began to smoke.
“I ate it all.”
“All I can say is,” he said.  But instead of saying all he could say he cracked three eggs into the skillet.
“Zirconium, zinc, yttrium, ytterbium, xenon,” I recited.
“Damn straight,” he said.
He left for work still licking his fingers.  I listened to his footsteps as he descended the fire escape, to the crunch of driveway gravel under his bike tires.  I opened one of my cupboards to look for something to eat.  I had:
1) a package of Ramen noodles; and
2) an unopened jar of peanut butter.
I leaned over the Periodic Table, dipping chunks of noodles in peanut butter and eating them.  The words and abbreviations shied away so I opened the textbook, which started with history.  It went:  
1)  Democritus names his indivisible particles atomos;
2) Plato and Aristotle protest; Democritus sticks to his guns;
4) Joseph Proust thinks up the law of definite proportions: compounds always have the same kind of elements stuck onto each other, in the same numbers;
5) Dalton comes up with the law of multiple proportions and, my favorite, the law of conservation of mass: matter can’t be created or destroyed.
6)  J.J. Thompson invents the cathode ray tube;
7)  R.A. Millikan figures out the charge of an electron;
8)  Rontgen, Becquerel, Curie, something-something-something, alpha, beta, gamma rays;
9)  Rutherford and his cohorts frolic around the nucleus;
10)  Their cover blown, protons, neutrons, and electrons surrender to science and chemistry is ours.

I got up, wandered the apartment, peered into the other bedrooms.  I turned the television on and instantly was mesmerized by Judge Joe Brown lambasting a teenager who’d kicked in his neighbor’s car door.  This ain’t no way to conduct yourself as a young gentleman, hear?
I nodded.
Awaiting the verdict during a commercial, I examined the ceiling.  It had been plastered over in random, endearing shapes.  My eyes wouldn’t stop following them.  Then my neck started to hurt so I looked up.  Judge Joe Brown had come to a close and soap operas had begun.  I muted the sound.  The actors emoted into each other’s faces, telephone receivers, thin air, over gravestones.  A blond couple kissed athletically.   A woman in a turquoise pantsuit poured herself a drink from a crystal flask and paced her living room.  A gloomy man pensively fondled a revolver; he had a plan.
I returned to the kitchen.  It was 2:30.  Hours had passed like water.  I opened The Story of Chemistry.
I had just arrived at an explanation of how the Periodic Table is organized when Mitch returned from work.
“You’re still on that, man?”
“You appear to have gotten some more sun today, lifeguard man,” I observed.
“Six fifty an hour I better get something out of it.”
He sat down across from me and slid the textbook over to his side.
“You even talk like an English major,” he said.
He shut the book.
“You kill me,” he said.  “I need a shower.”
I felt so lonely.  I followed him and stood outside the bathroom door.
“When are the other guys coming?” I called.
“I don’t know, sometime.”
“What are their names, by the way?”
He didn’t seem to mind me standing there talking.
“Bryan with a y, and Brian with an i.”
“How do you tell them apart?”
Mitch laughed.  I jumped a little; I’d almost nodded off.
“You kill me. Their names are the same.  They’re different guys.”
“They should have different names,” I slurred.  I slid along the wall to my room,  tripped over the rug and fell onto my futon mattress.
“Rutherfordium,” I mumbled.  “Einsteinium.  Curium.  Mendelevium.”

Each of these elements, I knew, is a unique combination of different kinds of molecules, each with a different mass and size.  They were never created and will never be destroyed.  Mass must be conserved.  Nothing is ever lost.
I awoke completely contained in night.  I strained to see the ceiling.  My eyes rolled playfully around.  Where was I?  When a rhythmic thumping began in the adjacent room I recalled Mitch’s flawless golden forearm and remembered: I was at 241 Main Street, between the halfway house and the athletic supply store.  My man-pretty roommate was having sex in the next room.
The Table lurked on the ceiling above my bed.  I imagined it dropping on me like a net, the letters of the elements creeping over me in a blind panic.
Moving my futon in the dark was not as difficult as one might think.  My only other furniture is a dresser and some bookshelves.  I got down on my knees and plowed the mattress across the floor until it met resistance.  Then I crawled back on and slept.
Morning sun from the window illuminated my feet.  On the ceiling was a single crack, shaped like a coast.  I traced it with my eyes.  That was something I could memorize no problem.
There was a clang in the kitchen.  I listened for girl-sounds but heard none.    
“Hey,” Mitch said as I shuffled in.
“Hey.”
He rattled the skillet against the burner and swore.
“Long night?” I said.
He switched off the burner and we sat down at the table.   
“I brought home this girl.”
I nodded.   Everything was so simple.  It was morning.  I was awake. My pretty roommate was talking about a girl.  So simple and so pure.  Mitch looked me over.
“What, did you sleep last night, or some such shit?”
“I moved my bed.  What’s the girl’s name?”
“I don’t know.  I met her at the pool.  She looks like a fuckin’ Coppertone ad.  I got no sleep.”
“Maybe her name’s Coppertone.”
“I didn’t sleep for two seconds all night.”
He flipped open The Story of Chemistry, flipped it closed, and stood up abruptly.
“I’m late,” Mitch said.  “You’re gonna have to keep her company.”
“Okay.”
“Will you do that for me, man?”   
“I’ll make her breakfast.”
I realized he’d probably never had insomnia before.  He needed a crash course in sleepless living.  I stood up and put an arm around his shoulders, guiding him to the door.
“Drink some coffee,” I advised him.  “Do everything more carefully than usual.  Eat.  Say very little.  Simplify, simplify, simplify.”
“Okay,” he said.  He stepped out onto the fire escape.  His hair was a ragged halo in the morning sun.
“I’ll take care of Coppertone,” I called.
He stopped at the first landing and looked up at me with the insomniac’s exaggerated earnestness.  Then he blinked and disappeared down the next flight of stairs.
I went back inside, sat down at the table, and opened The Story of Chemistry.  It doesn’t have a linear plot, I thought, glancing affectionately over the Table.  It had a definite though irregular shape, and an internal order that I’d been on the brink of learning the previous afternoon.  I had to give the Table credit for trying to be symmetrical and predictable.  It was like the face of an insomniac, placidly concealing internal ruptures, desperate transfers of energy, broken bonds, on its pale surface expressing nothing beyond its own opaque nomenclature.
My stomach gurgled.  I thought I must be hungrier than I’d ever been.
Sitting on the bottom shelf of the fridge I found Mitch’s skillet, in it several broken pieces of bacon half-submerged in congealed grease.  I scraped it out into the trash.   
Fifteen minutes later, the kitchen was a merry chaos of sound:  sizzling bacon and eggs, the bottoms of my bare feet shuffling busily on the linoleum, the breathless bubbling of the coffee maker.  I was singing what I could recall of the Who’s “Pinball Wizard.”   I heaped food onto two plates and carried them to the table.  I sat and was silent a moment, as if praying.  Beyond the ticking of the stove element, my breathing, and the morning commuters’ cars dragging themselves up the hill and into town, the apartment was still. I hadn’t realized how quiet it was here.  You could think in this kind of quiet.  I decided to eat my breakfast and let myself think instead of studying The Story of Chemistry.  Things occurred to me, lazily: characters from books I’d read, scraps of poems, how my father used to pace restlessly around his office, smoking a cigarette without taking it out of his mouth, talking to me with his eyes closed.          When I’d cleared my plate I turned to Coppertone’s.  I was still hungry.  I decided to go check up on her, and, if she was still asleep, eat hers too.
I nudged the door to Mitch’s room open with my toe.  On a single white pillow lay a slender ivory forearm, underside up, fingers curled delicately.  Mitch had brought an arm home last night.  He’d met an arm at the pool, and seduced it, and now it was asleep on his pillow.  I sang softly as I shuffled back to the kitchen:  That deaf dumb blind kid sure plays a mean pinball.
I ate the arm’s breakfast fast, then went out on the landing, stood for a moment in the glaring sun, and started down the stairs.  I could go down to the town pool where Mitch worked.  Instead, I got on my bike and headed for the pond. The pond is deep and spring-fed.  Trees gather like patient spectators on the shore.   
I swam out into the middle and floated on my back.  My breath was loud in my ears.  Swallows flew back and forth overhead, erasing something.
I arrived home at sunset.  As I was locking my bike, I heard voices next door at the halfway house.  Two people were sitting across from each other at a picnic table.  One sat back with his head tilted, his hand cradling one side of his face.  The other, whose back was to me, sat hunched over the table, rocking and leaning on his elbows. As I reached the first landing of the fire escape, I heard laughter from above.
“I’m okay, you’re okay!” someone called.
The therapist and his client and I looked up at the third floor landing:  two more bronze towheads – Bryan and Brian – were leaning on the railing and laughing.  When I reached the top, they’d gone into the kitchen, leaving the door open, and Mitch was angrily dragging his skillet over the stove.
“I’m serious, man,” he said, whipping around, wielding the skillet.  “One:  this skillet is cast iron, morons, you don’t just wash it, understand, idiots?  Two:  don’t fuck with the people at the halfway house.  Go outside and, fuckin’, torture bugs instead.”
I was pleased.  Mitch was feeling the truth-telling effects of insomnia.
Bryan and Brian glanced at each other and rolled their eyes.
“Psychopath,” one of them mouthed to the other.
“Hey,” said one.  “I heard Dale Earnhardt Junior crashed his Corvette at NASCAR yesterday.”  They went into the living room where they took over the sofa and the television, surfing the channels, searching for the explosive crash.
“Earnhardt escaped, miraculously, with only minor burns,” exclaimed the newscaster.  “How is that possible, Steve?”
“I’m the one who washed your skillet,” I told Mitch.
He was leaning over the sink, scrubbing the skillet.
“Yeah, I figured.  But they’re idiots.  I’ll just scrape the rust off and oil it down.”
“Is Coppertone still here?”
“Nope.”
He let the skillet drop with a clang in the sink and turned around.
“You believe those shitheads, man?” he said to me.  He had dark wings under his puffy eyes.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“They’re here, what, fifteen minutes, and they’re all in my face.”
“I know.”
“Shit.”
I nodded, waited a beat.  Then I said:
“But at least Dale Earnhardt Junior escaped with only minor burns.”
He laughed and shuffled over to the table.
“Listen, let me cook you something to eat,” I suggested.  “Then you can help me finish memorizing the Periodic Table of Elements.  That’ll put you right to sleep.”
He opened The Story of Chemistry.
“Don’t you have anything better to do, man?” he murmured, his eyes running over the table as he saw it, really saw it, for the first time.
I smiled nostalgically.  Things had come full circle.  Now we would both sleep through the night.

                                                                                                   *       *       *


                                                                                             SEEING GHOSTS

I  was standing in the doorway between living room and foyer, waiting for the commercial so I could tell my husband about the girl who’d died in our house.  The neighbor had been out in the yard when I was on my way out for my doctor’s appointment, and she’d told me.  We had not spoken to those neighbors since we’d moved in a month before, but that day she decided she felt like coming over holding her watering can and introducing herself and telling me what she knew about this dead girl.  The only things we know about these neighbors are things we can see:  that they have a pool that they never use, an ugly, collapsing carport, a daughter with a ne’er do well boyfriend who honks his horn and waits in the car when he comes to take her out.  They still haven’t introduced themselves or even really looked at us, though they do seem to sense our presence.
That day’s conversation about the dead girl was our first contact, actually, with any of our neighbors.  I admit I was interested in what she told me.  Everyone’s interested in other people’s deaths.  Plus it seemed like something we ought to know about our new house, to help explain apparitions and disembodied voices.  Not that there had been any, at that point, or that either of us believed in such things.
I watched him watch a pair of animated gladiators spar on a tilted black plane.  The object of the game was to knock your opponent into oblivion. There was nothing else in their world.  Just the two of them, the black plane, and whoever had put them there.  Soon there would only be one of them left.  Where could it go from there?
To a commercial, that’s where.  A towheaded boy in a soccer uniform climbed into a minivan through a side door, followed by a smiling golden retriever.    From the driver’s seat, his mother watched him slyly, teeth gleaming.
“Someone died in this house,” I said.
 “Yeah?  Who?”
“A girl with cancer,” I said.  “Her room is the one up in the attic.”
“How do you know?”
“The neighbor told me.  She was out back today and she told me.”
 “That’s sad.”
I wondered if he meant it was sad that my neighbor and I had been out back talking about a girl who’d died, or that the girl had died, or both.
“Was she friendly?”
It took me a second to realize he meant the neighbor and not the dead girl.
“No.”
“What was she like, then?”
I thought about what she’d been like but drew a blank.  I remembered she had very small, very clean hands, and that her watering can was empty, and that she kept her empty hand clenched in a tiny fist while we talked.  No, she hadn’t been friendly.  She’d been dutiful, afraid, and obviously relieved when the conversation was over.
 “Informative,” I said, looking from him to the TV screen, where a young blonde woman was examining the reflection of her teeth in the bathroom mirror, turning her head from side to side.  She tilted her head and pouted fetchingly.  I ran my tongue over my own teeth.  I thought, they aren’t clean enough, they aren’t white enough.  I should have taken better care of them.
“I wonder if she left a ghost,” he said, twirling the remote.
“She didn’t say.  I suppose if she knew there was a ghost she would have told me.”
“Maybe she thought you don’t believe in ghosts.”
“But even if she did think that, if she thought she’d seen the ghost of the girl, you’d think she’d have told me about it.  To her it would have been reality.”
Actually, I thought, once you know about someone who’s died, it’s hard not to believe in their ghost, even if you never see it.  I thought this one would look more ordinary than you’d expect:  just a girl with nothing to do.
The show came back on.  He un-muted the sound and got that look on his face.  Listening time was over, but I’d talk to myself if I had to.
“I don’t really get why she chose today to come out and tell me,” I said.  “She didn’t seem all that pleased to meet me.  She didn’t invite us for drinks or give me a Bundt cake or anything.”
The gladiators stood at opposite ends of the black plane, their sabers at their sides, apparently waiting for orders.  I wanted him to stop watching.  I was used to wanting him to stop watching television, but this was different.
“What if you saw a ghost?” I said.  “Would you be scared?”
“Nope.”
“Say it’s three in the morning, and you wake up because I’m snoring and you have to go to the bathroom.  So you go out in the hall, and as you turn on the hall light, you feel something brush against the back of your hand.  And there in front of you is the ghost of the girl.  Then would you be scared?”
“Why do you want me to be scared?”
“I don’t,” I said.
The gladiators circled silently, poised to spring.  I touched the lump on my right breast with the pads of my fingers.  It was hard and well-formed, like a pearl.
“I’m going to bed.”
I climbed the dark staircase.  We hadn’t yet gotten around to installing light-switches for the stairs and upstairs hall.  We still haven’t.  I am afraid of the dark.  Every night I stand at the top of the stairs, breathless, spine tingling, feeling around in a panic for the light-pull.  I never find it right away.
Something soft brushed the back of my hand.  I brought my arms down to my sides and stood there stiffly.  Now all I could do was wait for what was to come next.  The ghost had found me.  It knew I believed in it now.