New Decameron Fifty-One: Vivian Shaw

The Nature of Things

by Vivian Shaw

For thou wilt mark here many a speck, impelled

By viewless blows, to change its little course,

and beaten backwards, to return again,

Hither and thither in all directions round.

— Titus Lucretius Carus, De rerum natura

I. Exercise

Imagine you are a Home Health Aide, or a Licensed Practical Nurse, or a Nursing Assistant, or any of the other titles they give to people such as yourself who visit the sick and infirm in their homes. Your job is to make sure they have not yet taken the toaster to the bath with them or spiked their instant coffee with lye—by mistake, by mistake, by mistake. You are patient with their absurd anxieties, comforting through their querulousness, unshockable by what they may or may not have done in their beds, in their underpants, in their minds. You have a round of these visits to make every day, and you have a routine. 

You do not perhaps love this work very much, but it is work and you will cling to it with both hands and your teeth if necessary, with a kid in middle school and an ex-husband in San Diego. 

Imagine, further, that one of the patients you visit every week is a woman tipping off the far side of late middle age into true gerontology, who for the most part can be trusted to take the wrapping off her microwave dinners before heating them up and who only occasionally calls you Annamae and asks whether someone called Louis has died yet. Imagine that this woman has a collection of strange and potentially hazardous objects in her apartment which you are not really sure she ought to have. They look like props from a horror-movie science lab. You have told your supervisor about this, and your supervisor has sighed and gone back to removing clumps from her 18-hour navy-blue mascara and told you to write a report if you think it’s that important.

With your supervisor in mind, pick up the largest of these objects and try, based on your knowledge of the patient and your observational skills, to deduce its purpose, its importance, and its potential hazard.

Describe the object. What is its substance, shape, size? It is made of glass and metal: a heavy glass bulb shaped like an inverted pear, easily two feet high from narrow base to broad top, with a series of glass-tube legs protruding from its narrow end just before the base. Count them: there are six. The legs bend at right-angles about three inches after they leave the glass bulb’s walls, and tilt upwards, like a series of blunt can-can dancers’ legs spiraling around the body of the bulb. From each leg a metal fitting gives itself up to an insulated wire. Inside the glass, there are no coily filaments as you would expect to find inside a regular light bulb. There is only a shimmery streaky silver haze on the inner surface, and a small pool of moving silver nestled in its base that swirls as you tilt the object: a miniature lake of mercury. It is sealed shut, an egg not to be cracked. The graphite and metal ends of its legs smell of ozone, like the air after a lightning-storm. 

 What, given all this, do you suppose this object is meant to be? There is skill and care in the complexity of the glass shape, the regularity of the legs, the swelling curve of the bulb’s dome. 

(You perhaps want to touch this dome, to cup your hand over it, feel the smoothness of the glass and the satisfying roundness. What would it taste like if you ran your tongue over it? Would it taste of salt, or dust, or nothing at all?)

What of the little puddle of quicksilver? You know, because you are well-educated and have taken classes on toxicology, that mercury is a poison. What else does it do? What is its significance?

II: Observation

October light flooded the fourteenth-floor room, catching each dust particle and gilding it, changing its nature for a moment from decay into decoration. Standing by one of the display tables, the old woman was reminded of a faraway summer, badly tailored jackets and uncomfortable shoes, shuffling sideways to be included in a long-ago black-and-white frame. Why do we need our pictures taken? she had asked. It’s the project that’s important. Not us.

One day we’ll be in textbooks, Lornie, if we make this work, he had said. All of Oppie’s boys. And girls.

And they had made it work. Two small suns had risen over cities in Japan. The war had ended. Then Harry had died, and Louis had died, and there had been memos. And more work. And secrecy.

The doorbell rang. She set down the great baby-sized glass bulb in its holder and went to answer the door, tucking hair behind her ear, looking down. Her hair was crisp, these days, almost without color. Hair like glass.

Package for you, ma’am, said the man at the door, one of two regular visitors she had grown to expect. From Berkeley. Sign here.

She signed, an illegible scrawl that had never been legible, even in the days when a larger hand held hers and guided it around the loops and whorls of letters. Illegibility had remained a constant: writing on a chalkboard in a room redolent of cigarettes, she had often had to go back and redraw the letters, sometimes even print in capitals, in order to get on with the work at hand.

Nice day, he said. For October. 

Yes, she said, already reaching for the box, the wonderful marvelous mysterious box, with its scuffmarks and bright costly colors: deep royal violet, flame-orange, colors that implied great worth. Violet was wrung from the crushed and powdered insides of sea-creatures’ shells. What made the orange, she wondered. Was it the scarlet dye minium, from which the label miniature was derived for illuminated manuscripts?

He was holding it out to her, and she could tell the silence had gone on too long. She took the box. 

Have a good day, ma’am, he said. 

Would you like to.... ?

… but the words died half-finished, he was already turning, already halfway down the hall, a particle in motion driven by a force that was not hers. She turned back into the apartment, closed the door behind her, locked it, and went to set the box down and prepare to discover what might lie within. First, though, saving up that little excitement, she made tea. 

This was a small ritual that soothed with its familiarity. Once there had been a stove in a little hastily-knocked-together kitchen: three tiny burners, its propane bottle squatting outside the house like a great steel puffball. That one she’d had to light with matches, but that was all right: everybody had matches, because everybody smoked cigarettes, and even those who didn’t were never without a light for Oppie. She would light the burner with a pop of blue flame and place the kettle on its hob, and it would put out heat, convection, radiation, energy transferring itself, until the water reached a temperature where it danced and flung itself about with such abandon that it became steam whistling out of the kettle’s throat in a thin shriek unbearable to hear.

Invariably they had forgotten it, and they took turns, summoned by that wailing, to leave the conversation with its functions and products and equations and go to make the tea, or coffee, or whatever was requested. She missed that, the reality of it, but now she had a small electric miracle of her own that heated the water when you plugged it in and pressed the button on the white plastic jug handle. It did not cry out when it reached climax: it clicked quietly and turned itself off, decorous, safe. 

She took her mug through to the great pale wooden room with its high windows flooded with light, and reached for the box from Berkeley. 

There was a cardboard strip built into the box, with helpful printed arrows, which one was supposed to pull but which never survived the act of pulling: she stuck a finger under the glued edge instead, and wriggled it along until the glue let go. Inside there was a smaller box.

Objects within objects, she thought. Cores within shells: nuclei within atoms. Grief within memory; memory within the slowly eroding containment of age.

Inside the smaller box, which had a red and black lightning bolt stamped on it, was a small glass and metal confection, about the size of a lightbulb, with little pin-like legs sticking out of the bottom and a silver-topped clear dome enclosing its strange guts. It had a great many little legs, unlike most of her tubes: it was her first and only nonode, nine electrodes, a rarefied and now almost completely useless piece of engineering genius. She freed it from its cardboard home and cupped it in her hands, rocking a little, before carrying it over to the windows where the sun could shine upon it with more vigor. 

Many years before, when she had been young and her hair had curled in brown waves rather than whitish static, it was impossible to imagine anybody collecting these things as curiosities. They had boxes of them, stacks of them. Vacuum tubes worked on a principle so simple it was laughable, thermionic emission; they were called valves because they conducted current only in one way, AC to DC, always going forward, never going back. When one tube burnt out there was another waiting to plug in and take its place: much like themselves, she remembered thinking, replaceable. Much like themselves: bright interested new graduate students, willing to mortgage the next four or five years of their lives to help the Army make a bomb.

II. Exercise

You, the Home Health Aide (you are, in fact, a Home Health Aide, and not one of the myriad other options you might have been), have had to ring the bell twice before your patient let you in. This was generally a sign that she was having a difficult day: but you found her properly dressed, not shuffling around wrong-buttoned with her hair at odd angles as if it had been nested in. 

How are we today, Professor, you said, as you came in. 

I got another item, she said. For my collection. The delivery man brought it. He visited me.

She drifted across the room to the kitchen and brought you her pillbox, labeled by time and day of the week. These ones in the morning, she told you, pointing, with the air of a patient instructor who has explained all this before, and these ones in the middle of the day, and these ones now, in the afternoon. Should she make tea, and take them with that? She could make you tea as well.

Yes, you told her, that would be good. Thank you, Dr. Merriman.

While she filled up the little electric kettle you began to make your round of the apartment: bed in decent shape, nothing that needed cleaning up; laundry service had come by and brought her clean towels yesterday and these were now hanging in the bathroom; nothing was spilt, nothing was broken, nothing was wrong. 

In the main room, what she called her workroom, the light from the windows caught each of the glassy lumpy things she had set out on the tables. Each of them sat apart from its neighbors, with a tiny hand-lettered card leaning against the ring of cork that held it up. You haven’t been able to make head or tail of the cards, although you have tried many times before, curious, and then slightly resentful at your lack of knowledge. They’re strings of numbers and letters: 150/6G, EQ80, AEG HR2/100/1.5A.

Given the aforementioned facts, circumstances, and situations, what do you imagine the object now in your hands, the great heavy glass bulb with its weight of mercury, means to your patient? What about the other objects in her collection? Why does she collect them, and could her collection be dangerous? Be creative in your analysis. Use all the methods at your disposal. Look at them, at these strange objects; balance the great bulb on a hip, out of the way, and pick them up, feel them in your hand. What could the tiny metal skyscraperscapes held in each, like ships in bottles, like palaces in eggs, signify? Why are the tops of the glass tubes silver? This one looks as if it could have been a lightbulb, but is not. That one has a silvery haze on the inside of its glass; that one has a dull gray coating inside its top that makes you think of old TVs. None of them look like the thing in the crook of your arm, the size of a child. What could it possibly do? Hold it up to the light.

IV: Observation

The smiling, and blonde, and above all young, lady is there. Her other visitor: her weekly visitor. She thinks the woman’s name is Heather, but it may be Sharon. It’s impossible to remember, and if she says one it will necessarily be the other, a collapsed waveform of embarrassment: best to think of her as the lady. Had any of them had names, really, back when she’d been alive? Their names hadn’t mattered, none of it had mattered, only the work and the numbers and the promise that when the time came and the button was pushed the thing would do what their equations said it would. 

The lady smiles, asks her about pills. Yes, she has taken them. Was just about to take the next lot, the FOUR P.M. compartment in the pill-box for today; she could have them with tea. Would the lady like tea? 

Yes, that would be good.

She makes tea. Earl Grey this time, the sharp scent of bergamot filling up the spaces in her head. There are many spaces in her head, hollows in the bone. She is aware of how she moves through the air of the apartment, through space, set in motion by forces, governed by laws. 

When she has made the tea she carries the mugs out to her workroom and begins to put together, at this time and in this place, not across the country and a lifetime ago, the words of a sentence in her head about the delivery man, her friend, her visitor. How she had begun to ask him if he would like a cup of tea, if he would like to come in, to enter this space, and how she had not done it fast enough. She wants to tell Sharon-or-Heather this, because there is no one else to tell, and she has not spoken with anyone other than Sharon-or-Heather in a long time now. 

She knows Sharon-or-Heather has not heard her approach because the lady does not turn from the tables where she is examining the collection, the new nonode sitting in pride of place beside an empty collar which should hold a great glass object: where is it, where is it, what has happened to it? She makes a startled inarticulate noise.

The lady turns around sharply and she is no longer smiling, she is now neither Sharon nor Heather but appalled, because the vast thing she has been holding has slipped out of her grasp with the momentum of her turning and she fumbles desperately for it but it is heavy, it is dense and complex, and it turns through the air and it stops.

V. Exercise

A hazardous object has been dropped and broken in the home of one of your patients, constituting not only a toxicological emergency but also a sharps emergency. There is free mercury in the room and pieces of broken glass are spread in a wide radius. Your patient, who cannot remember your name despite the fact that you have been visiting her now for almost four years, should not have had access to such dangerous objects in the first place, and you regret not having written a report to your supervisor about it before now.

(You are angry with your patient partly because it is you who has dropped and broken her object. This is illogical. It is also a reaction you have been trained to expect.)

What is the first action you take in this situation: 

1) Attempt to calm the distraught patient, or;

2) Attempt to address the toxicological emergency and the danger of the broken glass, or; 

3) Ask the patient who ‘Louis’ is, and why he is dying, and why she thinks you know the answers, or;

4) Ask the patient why she and the world are the way they are?

VI. Conclusion

She does not feel the thin sharp pains as glass bites into her knees, the palms of her hands. She does not see the beads of silver skitter across the floor and shimmer in thick puddles, reflecting the ceiling. She does not hear the woman saying her name—not Doctor Merriman, but her actual name, the one nobody uses any more, the one that had ended before dawn in the summer of 1945. She does not smell the metallic taint on the air as she scrabbles on the floorboards for the broken base of her pride and joy, her mercury-arc rectifier, an object of such talismanic significance that one which ran a RAF radar station had been named for a pulp-fiction villain. She does not taste the tears that roll down her furrowed cheeks so much as the windblown gritty dust that filled every crack and crevice of their lives on the mesa; an acrid, alkaline taste, bitter and inescapable. 

She does not seem to be entirely present as she gathers the remains of her prize into her glass-spined hands and croons to it, weeping, desolate—rocking back and forth on the pale wood floor from which the sunlight has withdrawn, as if hammered by blows from something it is not possible to see.

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"Tea," he says in a disgusted tone, handing Maya a mug.

"What's wrong with tea? Tea's all right as long as you make it with boiling water, which she did. She was a scientist," Maya sips the tea. It's a bit thin.

"Tea's all very well at three o'clock in the afternoon, but I want coffee in the morning," he grumbles. "Besides, something to eat would have been nice. And what was she making anyway?"

"We can't know. She broke it, the health visitor. So we'll never know. That's sad," Maya says. She strokes the cat and he purrs. She puts her teacup down. "Do we have anything fun and cheerful?"

"Do we have anything with coffee?" he asks. "Are you getting tired of sitting here reading?"

Maya thinks about it. "Maybe a little bit. This is the sixth day we've been doing it. It might be nice to do something else."

"Then maybe what we need is something about a plague."

"You're kidding! That's the last thing we need," Maya says, horrified. "Anyway we had some. The Silverberg. The Gerber, with the aliens."

"Yes. We can't pretend plague doesn't exist just because there is one. How about something about a really different kind of plague?"

"Mmmmaybe," Maya says. "What is it?"

"It's the first part of a novella called The Physicians of Vilnoc, and it's by Lois McMaster Bujold."

Maya squeals with delight. "A new Penric! Give it here!"

He holds it up out of her reach. "Even if it's about plague?"

"If it's a new story about Pen and Des I want it whatever it's about. That's the kind of thing to restore my joy in reading."

He grins and gives her the book, and they read.