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THE STORY OF MY FAMOUS family is a story of genius and its consequences, I suppose, and I am uniquely and particularly suited to tell the story since genius avoided me—and I it—and I remain an ordinary man, if there is such a thing, calm in all weathers, aware of event, but uninterested and generally incapable of deciphering implication. As my genius brother Garrett used to say, “Reed, you’re not screwed too tight like the rest of us, but you’re still screwed.” Now, there’s a definition of the common man you can trust, and further, you can trust me. There’s no irony in that or deep inner meaning or Freudian slips, any kind of slips really, simply what it says. My mother told me many times I have a good heart, and of course, she was a genius, and that heart should help with this story, but a heart, as she said so often, good as it may be, is always trouble.

Part of the reason this story hasn’t come together before, the story of my famous family, is that no one remembers they were related. They all had their own names. My father was Duncan Landers, the noted NASA physicist, the man responsible for every facet of the photography of the first moon landing. There is still camera gear on the moon inscribed with this name. That is, Landers. He was born Duncan Lrsdyksz, which was changed when NASA began their public relations campaigns in the mid-sixties; the space agency suggested that physicists who worked for NASA should have more vowels in their names. They didn’t want their press releases to seem full of typographical errors or foreigners. Congress was reading this stuff. So Lrsdyksz became Landers. (My father’s close associate Igor Oeuroi didn’t get just vowels; his name became LeRoy Rodgers. After le Cowboy Star, my mother quipped.)

My mother was Gloria Rainstrap, the poet who spent twenty years fighting for workers’ rights from Texas to Alaska; in one string she gave four thousand consecutive lectures in her travels, not missing a night as she drove from village to village throughout the country. It still stands as some kind of record.

Wherever she went, she stirred up the best kind of trouble, reading her work and then spending hours in whatever guest house or spare bedroom she was given, reading the poems and essays of the people who had come to see her. She was tireless, driven by her overwhelming sense of fairness, and she was certainly the primary idealist to come out of twentieth-century Texas. When she started leaving home for months, years at a time, I was just a lad, but I remember her telling my father, Duncan, one night, “Texas is too small for what I have to do.”

This was not around the dinner table. We were a family of geniuses and did not have a dinner table. In fact, the only table we did have was my father’s drafting table, which was in the entry so that you had to squeeze sideways to even get into our house. “It sets the tone,” Duncan used to say. “I want anyone coming into our home to see my work. That work is the reason we have a roof, anyway.” He said that one day after my friend Jeff Shreckenbah and I inched past him on the way to my room. “And who are these people coming in the door?”

“It is your son and his friend,” I told him.

“Good,” he said, his benediction, but he said it deeply into his drawing, which is where he spent his time at home. He wouldn’t have known if the Houston Oilers had arrived, because he was about to invent the modern gravity-free vacuum hinge that is still used today.

Most of my father, Duncan Landers’s, work was classified, top-secret, eyes-only, but it didn’t matter. No one except Jeff Shreckenbah came to our house. People didn’t come over.

We were geniuses. We had no television, and we had no telephone. “What should I do,” my father would say from where he sat in the entry, drawing, “answer some little buzzing device? Say hello to it?” NASA tried to install phones for us. Duncan took them out. It was a genius household and not to be diminished by primitive electronic foo-fahs.

My older sister was named Christina by my father and given the last name Rossetti by my mother. When she finally fled from M.I.T. at nineteen, she gave herself a new surname: Isotope. There had been some trouble, she told me, personal trouble, and she needed the new name to remind herself she wouldn’t last long—and then she asked me how I liked my half-life. I was twelve then, and she laughed and said, “I’m kidding, Reed. You’re not a genius; you’re going to live forever.” I was talking to her on the “hot line,” the secret phone our housekeeper, Clovis Arrnandy, kept in a kitchen cupboard.

“Where are you going?” I asked her.

“West with Mother,” she said. Evidently, Gloria Rainstrap had driven up to Boston to rescue Christina from some sort of meltdown. “A juncture of some kind,” my father told me. “Not to worry”

Christina said, “I’m through with theoretical chemistry, but chemistry isn’t through with me. Take care of Dad. See you later.”

We three children were eight years apart; that’s how geniuses plan their families. Christina had been gone for years, it seemed, from our genius household; she barely knew our baby brother, Garrett.

Garrett and I took everything in stride. We accepted that we were a family of geniuses and that we had no telephone or refrigerator or proper beds. We thought it was natural to eat crackers and sardines months on end. We thought the front yard was supposed to be a jungle of overgrown grass, weeds, and whatever reptiles would volunteer to live there. Twice a year the City of Houston street crew came by and mowed it all down, and daylight would pour in for a month or two. We had no cars. My father was always climbing into white Chevrolet station wagons, unmarked, and going off to the NASA Space Center south of town. My mother was always stepping up into orange VW buses driven by other people and driving off to tour. My sister had been the youngest student at M.I.T. My brother and I did our own laundry for years and walked to school, where by about seventh grade, we began to see the differences between the way ordinary people lived and the way geniuses lived. Other people’s lives, we learned, centered fundamentally on two things: television and soft foods rich with all the versions of sugar.

By the time I entered junior high school, my mother’s travels had kicked into high gear, and she hired a woman we came to know well, Clovis Armandy, to live in and to assist with our corporeal care. Gloria Rainstrap’s parental theory and practice could be summed up by the verse I heard her say a thousand times before I reached the age of six: “Feed the soul, the body finds a way.” And she fed our souls with a groaning banquet of iron ethics at every opportunity. She wasn’t interested in sandwiches or casseroles. She was the kind of person who had a moral motive for her every move. We had no refrigerator because it was simply the wrong way to prolong the value of food, which had little value in the first place. We had no real furniture because furniture became the numbing insulation of drones for the economy, an evil in itself. If religion was the opiate of the masses, then home furnishings were the Novocain of the middle class. Any small surfeit of comfort undermined our moral fabric. We live for the work we can do, not for things, she told us. I’ve met and heard lots of folks who shared Gloria’s posture toward life on this earth, but I’ve never found anyone who put it so well, presented her ideas so convincingly, beautifully, and so insistently. They effectively seduced you into wanting to go without. I won’t put any of her poems in this story, but they were transcendent. The Times called her “Buddha’s angry daughter.” My mother’s response to people who were somewhat shocked at our empty house and its unkempt quality was, “We’re ego distant. These little things,” she’d say, waving her hand over the litter of the laundry, discarded draft paper, piles of top-secret documents in the hallway, various toys, the odd empty tin of sardines, “don’t bother us in the least. We aren’t even here for them.” I always loved that last and still use it when a nuisance arises: I’m not even here for it. “Ego distant,” my friend Jeff Shreckenbah used to say, standing in our empty house, “which means your ma doesn’t sweat the small stuff.”

My mother’s quirk, and one she fostered, was writing on the bottom of things. She started it because she was always gone, away for months at a time, and she wanted us to get her messages throughout her absence and thereby be reminded again of making correct decisions and ethical choices. It was not unusual to find ballpoint-pen lettering on the bottom of our shoes, and little marker messages on the bottom of plates (where she wrote in a tiny script), and anywhere that you could lift up and look under, she would have left her mark. These notes primarily confused us. There I’d be in math class and cross my legs and see something on the edge of my sneaker and read, “Your troubles, if you stay alert, will pass very quickly away.”

I’m not complaining. I never, except once or twice, felt deprived. I like sardines, still. It was a bit of a pinch when we got to high school, and I noted with new poignancy that I didn’t quite have the wardrobe to keep up. Geniuses dress plain but clean, and not always as clean as their ordinary counterparts, who have nothing better to do with their lives than buy and sort and wash clothes.

Things were fine. I turned seventeen. I was hanging out sitting around my bare room, reading books, the History of This, the History of That, dry stuff, waiting for my genius to kick in. This is what had happened to Christina. One day when she was ten, she was having a tea party with her dolls, which were two rolled pink towels, the next day she cataloged and diagrammed the amino acids, laying the groundwork for two artificial sweeteners and a mood elevator. By the time my mother, Gloria Rainstrap, returned from the Northwest and my father looked up from his table, the State Department “mentors” had been by and my sister, Christina, was on her way to the inner sanctums of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I remember my mother standing against my father’s drafting table, her hands along the top. Her jaw was set and she said, “This is meaningful work for Christina, her special doorway.”

My father dragged his eyes up from his drawings and said, “Where’s Christina now?”

 

So the day I went into Garrett’s room and found him writing equations on a huge scroll of butcher paper, which he had used until that day to draw battle re-creations of the French and Indian War, was a big day for me. I stood there in the gloom, watching him crawl along the paper, reeling out figures of which very few were numbers I recognized, most of the symbols being X’s and Y’s and the little twisted members of the Greek alphabet, and I knew that it had skipped me. Genius had cast its powerful, clear eye on me and said, “No thanks.” At least I was that smart. I realized that I was not going to get to be a genius.

The message took my body a piece at a time, loosening each joint and muscle on the way up and then filling my face with a strange warmth, which I knew immediately was relief.

I was free.

I immediately took a job doing landscaping and general cleanup and maintenance at the San Jacinto Resort Motel on the old Hempstead Highway. My friend Jeff Shreckenbah worked next door at Alfredo’s American Cafe, and he had told me that the last guy doing handiwork at the motel had been fired for making a holy mess of the parking lot with a paintbrush, and when I applied, Mr. Rakkerts, the short little guy who owned the place, took me on. These were the days of big changes for me. I bought a car, an act that would have at one time been as alien for me as intergalactic travel or applying to barber college. I bought a car. It was a four-door limegreen Plymouth Fury III, low miles. I bought a pair of chinos. These things gave me exquisite pleasure. I was seventeen and I had not known the tangible pleasure of having things. I bought three new shirts and a wristwatch with a leather strap, and I went driving in the evenings, alone south from our subdivision of Spring Woods with my arm on the green sill of my lime-green Plymouth Fury III through the vast spaghetti bowl of freeways and into the mysterious network of towers that was downtown Houston. It was my dawning.

Late at night, my blood rich with wonder at the possibilities of such a vast material planet, I would return to our tumbledown genius ranch house, my sister off putting new legs on the periodic table at M.I.T., my mother away in Shreveport showing the seaport workers there the way to political and personal power, my brother in his room edging closer to new theories of rocket reaction and thrust, my father sitting by the entry, rapt in his schematics. As I came in and sidled by his table and the one real light in the whole front part of the house, his pencilings on the space station hinge looking as beautiful and inscrutable to me as a sheet of music, he’d say my name as simple greeting. “Reed.”

“Duncan,” I’d say in return.

“How goes the metropolis?” he’d add, not looking up. His breath was faintly reminiscent of sardines; in fact, I still associate that smell, which is not as unpleasant as it might seem, with brilliance. I know he said metropolis because he didn’t know for a moment which city we were in.

“It teems with industrious citizenry well into the night,” I’d answer.

Then he’d say it, “Good,” his benediction, as he’d carefully trace his lead-holder and its steel-like wafer of 5H pencil-lead along a precise new line deep into the vast white space. “That’s good.”

 

The San Jacinto Resort Motel along the Hempstead Highway was exactly what you might expect a twenty-unit motel to be in the year 1966. The many bright new interstates had come racing to Houston and collided downtown in a maze, and the old Hempstead Highway had been supplanted as a major artery into town. There was still a good deal of traffic on the four-lane, and the motel was always about half full, and as you would expect, never the same half. There were three permanent occupants, including a withered old man named Newcombe Shinetower, who was a hundred years old that summer and who had no car, just a room full of magazines with red and yellow covers, stacks of these things with titles like Too Young for Comfort and Treasure Chest. There were other titles. I was in Mr. Shinetower’s room only on two occasions. He wore the same flannel shirt every day of his life and was heavily gone to seed. Once or twice a day I would see him shuffling out toward Alfredo’s American Cafe, where Jeff told me he always ate the catfish. “You want to live to be a hundred,” Jeff said, “eat the catfish.” I told him I didn’t know about a hundred and that I generally preferred smaller fish. I was never sure if Mr. Shinetower saw me or not as I moved through his line of sight. He might have nodded; it was hard to tell. What I felt was that he might exist on another plane, the way rocks are said to; they’re in there but in a rhythm too slow for humans to perceive.

It was in his room, rife with the flaking detritus of the ages, that Jeff tried to help me reckon with the new world. “You’re interested in sex, right?” he asked me one day as I took my break at the counter of Alfredo’s. I told him I was, but that wasn’t exactly the truth. I was indifferent. I understood how it was being packaged and sold to the American people, but it did not stir me, nor did any of the girls we went to school with, many of whom were outright beauties and not bashful about it. This was Texas in the sixties. Some of these buxom girls would grow up and try to assassinate their daughters’ rivals on the cheerleading squad. If sex was the game, some seemed to say, deal me in. And I guess I felt it was a game, too, one I could sit out. I had begun to look a little closer at the ways I was different from my peers, worrying about anything that might be a genius tendency. And I took great comfort in the unmistakable affection I felt for my Plymouth Fury III.

“Good,” he said. “If you’re interested, then you’re safe; you’re not a genius. Geniuses”—here he leaned closer to me and squinted his eyes up to let me know this was a groundbreaking postulate-”have a little trouble in the sex department.”

I liked Jeff; he was my first “buddy.” I sat on the round red Naugahyde stool at Alfredo’s long Formica counter and listened to his speech, including, “sex department,” and I don’t know, it kind of made sense to me. There must have been something on my face, which is a way of saying there must have been nothing on my face, absolutely nothing, a blank blank, because Jeff pulled his apron off his head and said, “Meet me out back in two minutes.” He looked down the counter to where old Mr. Shinetower sucked on his soup. “We got to get you some useful information.”

Out back, of course, Jeff led me directly around to the motel and Mr. Shinetower’s room, which was not unlocked, but opened when Jeff gave the doorknob a healthy rattle. Inside in the sour dark, Jeff lit the lamp and picked up one of the old man’s periodicals.

Jeff held the magazine and thumbed it like a deck of cards, stopping finally at a full-page photograph that he presented to me with an odd kind of certainty. “There,” he said. “This is what everybody is trying for. This is the goal.” It was a glossy color photograph, and I knew what it was right away, even in the poor light, a shiny shaved pubis, seven or eight times larger than life size. “This makes the world go round.”

I was going along with Jeff all the way on this, but that comment begged for a remark, which I restrained. I could feel my father in me responding about the forces that actually caused and maintained the angular momentum of the earth. Instead I looked at the picture, which had its own lurid beauty. Of course, what it looked like was a landscape, a barren but promising promontory in ?ot this but another world, the seam too perfect a fold for anything but ceremony. I imagined landing a small aircraft on the tawny slopes and approaching the entry, stepping lightly with a small party of explorers, alert for the meaning of such a place. The air would be devoid of the usual climatic markers (no clouds or air pressure), and in the stillness we would be silent and reverential. The light in the photograph captivated me in that it seemed to come from everywhere, a flat, even twilight that would indicate a world with one or maybe two distant polar suns. There was an alluring blue shadow that ran along the cleft the way a footprint in snow holds its own blue glow, and that aberration affected and intrigued me.

Jeff had left my side and was at the window, on guard, pleased that I was involved in my studies. “So,” he said. “It’s really something, isn’t it?” He came to me, took the magazine and took one long look at the page the way a thirsty man drinks from a jug, and he set it back on the stack of Old Man Shinetower’s magazines.

“Yes,” I said. “It certainly is.” Now that it was gone, I realized I had memorized the photograph, that place.

“Come on. Let’s get out of here before he gets back.” Jeff cracked the door and looked out, both ways. “Whoa,” he said, setting the door closed again. “He’s coming back. He’s on the walk down about three rooms.” Jeff then did an amazing thing: he dropped like a rock to all fours and then onto his stomach and slid under the bed. I’d never seen anyone do that; I’ve never seen it since. I heard him hiss: “Do something. Hide.”

Again I saw myself arriving in the photograph. Now I was alone. I landed carefully and the entire venture was full of care, as if I didn’t want to wake something. I had a case of instruments and I wanted to know about that light, that shadow. I could feel my legs burn as I climbed toward it step by step.

What I did in the room was take two steps back into the corner and stand behind the lamp. I put my hands at my side and my chin up. I stood still. At that moment we heard a key in the lock and daylight spilled across the ratty shag carpet. Mr. Shinetower came in. He was wearing the red-and-black plaid shirt that he wore every day. It was like a living thing; someday it would go to lunch at Alfredo’s without him.

He walked by me and stopped for a moment in front of the television to drop a handful of change from his pocket into a mason jar on top, turn on the television until it lit and focused, and then he continued into the little green bathroom, and I saw the door swing halfway closed behind him.

Jeff slid out from the bed, stood hastily, his eyes whirling, and opened the door and went out. He was closing it behind him when I caught the edge and followed him into the spinning daylight. When I pulled the door, he gasped, so I shut it and we heard it register closed, and then we slipped quickly through the arbor to the alley behind the units and then ran along the overgrown trail back to the bayou and sat on the weedy slope. Jeff was covered with clots of dust and hairy white goo-gah. It was thick in his hair and I moved away from him while he swatted at it for a while. Here we could smell the sewer working at the bayou, an odd, rich industrial silage, and the sky was gray, but too bright to look at, and I went back to the other world for a moment, the cool perfect place I’d been touring in Mr. Shinetower’s magazine, quiet and still, and offering that light. Jeff was spitting and pulling feathers of dust from his collar and sleeves. I wanted so much to be stirred by what I had seen; I had stared at it and I wanted it to stir me, and it had done something. I felt something. I wanted to see that terrain, chart it, understand where the blue glow arose and how it lay along the juncture, and how that light, I was certain, interfered with the ordinary passage of time. Time? I had a faint headache.

“That was close,” Jeff said finally. He was still cloaked with flotsam from under Mr. Shinetower’s bed. “But it was worth it. Did you get a good look? See what I’m talking about?”

“It was a remarkable photograph,” I said.

“Now you know. You’ve seen it, you know. I’ve got to get back to work. Let’s go fishing this weekend, eh?” He rose and, still whacking soot and ashes and wicked whatevers from his person, ran off toward Alfredo’s.

“I’ve seen it,” I said, and I sat there as the sadness bled through me. Duncan would have appreciated the moment and corrected Jeff the way he corrected me all those years. “Seeing isn’t knowing,” he would say. “To see something is only to establish the first terms of your misunderstanding.” That I remembered him at such a time above the rife bayou moments after my flight over the naked photograph made me sad. I was not a genius, but I would be advised by one forevermore.

Happily, my work at the motel was straightforward and I enjoyed it very much. I could do most of it with my shirt off, cutting away the tenacious vines from behind each of the rooms so that the air-conditioning units would not get strangled, and I sweated profusely in the sweet humid air. I painted the pool fence and enameled the three metal tables a kind of turquoise blue, a fifties turquoise that has become tony again just this year, a color that calls to the passerby: Holiday! We’re on holiday!

Once a week I poured a pernicious quantity of lime into the two manholes above the storm sewer, and it fell like snow on the teeming backs of thousands of albino waterbugs and roaches that lived there. This did not daunt them in the least. I am no expert on any of the insect tribes nor do I fully understand their customs, but my association with those subterranean multitudes showed me that they looked forward to this weekly toxic snowfall.

Twice a week I pressed the enormous push broom from one end of the driveway to the other until I had a wheelbarrow full of gravel and the million crushed tickets of litter people threw from their moving vehicles along the Hempstead Highway It was wonderful work. The broom alone weighed twenty pounds. The sweeping, the painting, the trimming braced me; work that required simply my back, both my arms and both my legs, but neither side of my brain.

Mr. Leeland Rakkerts lived in a small apartment behind the office and could be summoned by a bell during the night hours. He was just sixty that June. His wife had passed away years before and he’d become a reclusive little gun nut, and had a growing gallery of hardware on a pegboard in his apartment featuring long-barreled automatic weaponry and at least two dozen huge handguns. But he was fine to me, and he paid me cash every Friday afternoon. When he opened the cash drawer, he always made sure that be you friend or foe, you saw the .45 pistol that rested there, too. My mother would have abhorred me working for him, a man she would have considered the enemy, and she would have said as much, but I wasn’t taking the high road, nor the low road, just a road. That summer, the upkeep of the motel was my job, and I did it as well as I could. I’d taken a summer job and was making money. I didn’t weigh things on my scale of ethics every ten minutes, because I wasn’t entirely sure I had such a scale. I certainly didn’t have one as fully evolved as my mother’s.

It was a bit like being in the army: when in doubt, paint something. I remeasured and overpainted the parking lot where the last guy had drunkenly painted a wacky series of parentheses where people were supposed to park, and I did a good job with a big brush and five gallons of high mustard yellow, and when I finished I took the feeling of satisfaction in my chest to be simply that: satisfaction. Even if I was working for the devil, the people who put their cars in his parking lot would be squared away.

Getting in my Plymouth Fury III those days with a sweaty back and a pocketful of cash, I knew I was no genius, but I felt-—is this close?—like a great guy, a person of some command.

 

That fall my brother, Garrett Lrsdyksz (he’d changed his name back with a legal kit that Baxter, our Secret Service guy, had got him through the mail), became the youngest student to matriculate at Rice University. He was almost eleven. And he didn’t enter as a freshman; he entered as a junior. In physics, of course. There was a little article about it on the wire services, noting that he had, without any assistance, set forward the complete set of equations explaining the relationship between the rotation of the earth and “special atmospheric aberrations most hospitable to exit trajectories of ground-fired propulsion devices.” You can look it up and all you’ll find is the title because the rest, like all the work he did his cataclysmic year at Rice, is classified, top-secret, eyes-only. Later he explained his research this way to me: “There are storms and then there are storms, Reed. A high-pressure area is only a high-pressure area down here on earth; it has a different pressure on the other side.”

I looked at my little brother, a person forever in need of a haircut, and I thought: He’s mastered the other side, and I can just barely cope with this one.

 

That wasn’t exactly true, of course, because my Plymouth Fury III and my weekly wages from the San Jacinto Resort Motel allowed me to start having a little life, earthbound as it may have been. I started hanging out a little at Jeff Shreckenbah’s place, a rambling hacienda out of town with two outbuildings where his dad worked on stock cars. Jeff’s mother called me ladykiller, which I liked, but which I couldn’t hear without imagining my mother’s response; my mother who told me a million times, “Morality commences in the words we use to speak of our next act.”

“Hey, Ladykiller,” Mrs. Shreckenbah would say to me as we pried open the fridge looking for whatever we could find. Mr. Shreckenbah made me call him Jake, saying we’d save the last names for the use of the law-enforcement officials and members of the Supreme Court. They’d let us have Lone Star long-necks if we were staying, or Coca-Cola if we were hitting the road. Some nights we’d go out with Jake and hand him wrenches while he worked on his cars. He was always asking me, “What’s the plan?” an opening my mother would have approved of.

“We’re going fishing,” I told him, because that’s what Jeff and I started doing. I’d greet his parents, pick him up, and then Jeff and I would cruise hard down Interstate 45 fifty miles to Galveston and the coast of the warm Gulf of Mexico, where we’d drink Lone Star and surf-cast all night long, hauling in all sorts of mysteries of the deep. I loved it.

Jeff would bring along a pack of Dutch Masters cigars and I’d stand waist deep in the warm water, puffing on the cheap cigar, throwing a live shrimp on a hook as far as I could toward the equator, the only light being the stars above us, the gapped two-story skyline of Galveston behind us, and our bonfire on the beach, tearing a bright hole in the world.

When fish struck, they struck hard, waking me from vivid daydreams of Mr. Leeland Rakkerts giving me a bonus for sweeping the driveway so thoroughly, a twenty so crisp it hurt to fold it into my pocket. My dreams were full of crisp twenties. I could see Jeff over there, fifty yards from me, the little orange tip of his cigar glowing, starlight on the flash of his line as he cast. I liked having my feet firmly on the bottom of the ocean standing in the night. My brother and sister and my mother and father could shine their lights into the elemental mysteries of the world; I could stand in the dark and fish. I could feel the muscles in my arm as I cast again; I was stronger than I’d been two months ago, and then I felt the fish strike and begin to run south.

Having relinquished the cerebral, not that I ever had it in my grasp, I was immersing myself in the real world the same way I was stepping deeper and deeper into the Gulf, following the frenzied fish as he tried to take my line. I worked him back, gave him some, worked him back. Though I had no idea what I would do with it, I had decided to make a lot of money, and as the fish drew me up to my armpits and the bottom grew irregular, I thought about the ways it might be achieved. Being no genius, I had few ideas.

I spit out my cigar after the first wavelet broke over my face, and I called to Jeff, “I got one.”

He was behind me now, backing toward the fire, and he called, “Bring him up here and let’s see.”

The top half of my head, including my nose, and my two hands and the fishing pole were all that were above sea level when the fish relented and I began to haul him back. He broke the surface several times as I backed out of the ocean, reeling as I went. Knee deep, I stopped and lifted the line until a dark form lifted into the air. I ran him up to Jeff by the fire and showed him there, a two-pound catfish. When I held him, I felt the sudden shock of his gaffs going into my finger and palm.

“Ow!” Jeff said. “Who has got whom?” He took the fish from me on a gill stick.

I shook my stinging hand.

“It’s all right,” he assured me, throwing another elbow of driftwood onto the fire and handing me an icy Lone Star. “Let’s fry this guy up and eat him right now. I’m serious. This is going to be worth it. We’re going to live to be one hundred years old, guaranteed.”

We’d sit, eat, fish some more, talk, and late late we’d drive back, the dawn light gray across the huge tidal plain, smoking Dutch Masters until I was queasy and quiet, dreaming about my money, however I would make it.

Usually this dream was interrupted by my actual boss, Mr. Leeland Rakkerts, shaking my shoulder as I stood sleeping on my broom in the parking lot of the hot and bothered San Jacinto Resort Motel, saying, “Boy! Hey! Boy! You can take your zombie fits home or get on the stick here.” I’d give him the wide-eyed nod and continue sweeping, pushing a thousand pounds of scraggly gravel into a conical pile and hauling it in my wheelbarrow way out back into the thick tropical weeds at the edge of the bayou and dumping it there like a body. It wasn’t a crisp twenty-dollar bill he’d given me, but it was a valuable bit of advice for a seventeen-year-old, and I tried to take it as such.

Those Saturdays after we’d been to the Gulf beat in my skull like a drum, the Texas sun a thick pressure on my bare back as I moved through the heavy humid air skimming and vacuuming the pool, rearranging the pool furniture though it was never, ever moved because no one ever used the pool. People hadn’t come to the San Jacinto Resort Motel to swim. Then standing in the slim shade behind the office, trembling under a sheen of sweat, I would suck on a tall bottle of CocaCola as if on the very nectar of life, and by midafternoon as I trimmed the hedges along the walks and raked and swept, the day would come back to me, a pure pleasure, my lime-green Plymouth Fury III parked in the shady side of Alfredo’s American Cafe, standing like a promise of every sweet thing life could offer.

 

These were the days when my brother, Garrett, was coming home on weekends, dropped at our curb by the maroon Rice University van after a week in the research dorms, where young geniuses from all over the world lived in bare little cubicles, the kind of thing somebody with an I.Q. of 250 apparently loves. I had been to Garrett’s room on campus and it was perfect for him. There was a kind of pad in one corner surrounded by a little bank of his clothing and the strip of butcher paper running the length of the floor, covered with numbers and letters and tracked thoroughly with the faint gray intersecting grid of sneaker prints. His window looked out onto the pretty green grass quad.

It was the quietest building I have ever been in, and I was almost convinced that Garrett might be the only inmate, but when we left to go down to the cafeteria for a sandwich, I saw the other geniuses in their rooms, lying on their stomachs like kids drawing with crayons on a rainy day Then I realized that they were kids and it was a rainy day and they were working with crayons; the only difference was that they were drawing formulas for how many muons could dance on a quark.

Downstairs there were a whole slug of the little people in the dining hall sitting around in the plastic chairs, swinging their feet back and forth six inches off the floor, ignoring their trays of tuna-fish sandwiches and tomato soup, staring this way and then that as the idea storms in their brains swept through. You could almost see they were thinking by how their hair stood in fierce clusters.

There was one adult present, a guy in a blue sweater vest who went from table to table urging the children to eat: Finish that sandwich, drink your milk, go ahead, use your spoon, try the soup, it’s good for you. I noticed he was careful to register and gather any of the random jottings the children committed while they sat around doodling in spilled milk. I guess he was a member of the faculty. It would be a shame for some nine-year-old to write the key to universal field theory in peanut butter and jelly and then eat the thing.

“So,” I said as we sat down, “Garrett. How’s it going?”

Garrett looked at me, his trance interrupted, and as it melted away and he saw me and the platters of cafeteria food before us, he smiled. There he was, my little brother, a sleepy-looking kid with a spray of freckles up and over his nose like the crab nebula, and two enthusiastic front teeth that would be keeping his mouth open for decades. “Reed,” he said. “How’s it going? I love that. I’ve always liked your acute sense of narrative. So linear and right for you.” His smile, which took a moment and some force to assemble, was ancient, beneficent, as if he both envied and pitied me for something, and he shook his head softly. “But things here aren’t going, kid.” He poked a finger into the white bread of his tuna sandwich and studied the indentation like a man finding a footprint on the moon. “Things here are. This is it. Things…” He started again. “Things aren’t bad, really. It’s kind of a floating circle. That’s close. Things aren’t going; they float in the circle. Right?”

We were both staring at the sandwich; I think I might have been waiting for it to float, but only for a second. I understood what he was saying. Things existed. I’m not that dumb. Things, whatever they might be, and that was a topic I didn’t even want to open, had essence, not process. That’s simple; that doesn’t take a genius to decipher. “Great,” I said. And then I said what you say to your little brother when he sits there pale and distracted and four years ahead of you in school, “Why don’t you eat some of that, and I’ll take you out and show you my car.”

It wasn’t as bad a visit as I’m making it sound. We were brothers; we loved each other. We didn’t have to say it. The dining room got me a little until I realized I should stop worrying about these children and whether or not they were happy. Happiness wasn’t an issue. The place was clean; the food was fresh. Happiness, in that cafeteria, was simply beside the point.

On the way out, Garrett introduced me to his friend Donna Li, a ten-year-old from New Orleans, whom he said was into programming. She was a tall girl with shiny hair and a ready smile, eating alone by the window. This was 1966 and I was certain she was involved somehow in television. You didn’t hear the word computer every other sentence back then. When she stood to shake my hand, I had no idea of what to say to her and it came out, “I hope your programming is floating in the circle.”

“It is,” she said.

“She’s written her own language,” Garrett assured me, “and now she’s on the applications.”

It was my turn to speak again and already I couldn’t touch bottom, so I said, “We’re going out to see my car. Do you want to see my car?”

Imagine me in the parking lot then with these two little kids. On the way out I’d told Garrett about my job at the motel and that Jeff Shreckenbah and I had been hanging out and fishing on the weekends and that Jeff’s dad raced stock cars, and for the first time all day Garrett’s face filled with a kind of wonder, as if this were news from another world, which I guess it was. There was a misty rain with a faint petrochemical smell in it, and we approached my car as if it were a sleeping Brontosaurus. They were both entranced and moved toward it carefully, finally putting their little hands on the wet fender in unison. “This is your car,” Garrett said, and I wasn’t sure if it was the your or the car that had him in awe.

I couldn’t figure out what floats in the circle or even where the circle was, but I could rattle my keys and start that Plymouth Fury III and listen to the steady sound of the engine, which I did for them now. They both backed away appreciatively.

“It’s a large car,” Donna Li said.

“Reed,” Garrett said to me. “This is really something. And what’s that smell?”

I cocked my head, smelling it, too, a big smell, budging the petrocarbons away, a live, salty smell, and then I remembered: I’d left half a bucket of bait shrimp in the trunk, where they’d been ripening for three days since my last trip to Galveston with Jeff.

“That’s rain in the bayou, Garrett.”

“Something organic,” Donna Li said, moving toward the rear of the vehicle.

“Here, guys,” I said, handing Garrett the bag of candy, sardine tins, and peanut-butter-and-cheese packs I’d brought him. I considered for half a second showing him the pile of rotting crustaceans; it would have been cool and he was my brother. But I didn’t want to give the geniuses the wrong first impression of the Plymouth.

“Good luck with your programming,” I told Donna Li, shaking her hand. “And Garrett, be kind to your rocketry.”

Garrett smiled at that again and said to Donna, “He’s my brother.”

And she added, “And he owns the largest car in Texas.”

I felt bad driving my stinking car away from the two young people, but it was that or fess up. I could see them standing in my rearview mirror for a long time. First they watched me, then they looked up, both of them for a long time. They were geniuses looking into the rain; I counted on their being able to find a way out of it.