Angels and Electrons: A Sub-Suburb Tale

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  My dad's people were German, but his father's family had left for America in the 1700’s and they had been farmers first in Tennessee, then in Illinois, then in Oklahoma. He was a dreamy boy in a house full of bossy sisters. He made one of the first crystal radios in the state from a chunk of galena ore that fell from one of the many passing train cars. He combed the air with that chunk of ore and a cat's whisker and an antenna strung out his window and along the rooftop, then to a tree. He enlisted in the navy in World War II to escape the boring farm and his bossy sisters and to keep from getting drafted into the infantry. He spent an aimless life aboard a minesweeper in the South Pacific clearing island harbor after island harbor so the Marines could smoke the Japs out of their caves. Only Truman's atom bombs kept him from probably dying in the impending assault on the Japanese mainland. But he only occasionally thought of this. He was into radio. He maintained the ship's radios.

  Someone found out he knew German. He talked in his sleep. His buddies almost strung him up when they found this out and they turned him in to the CPO. The CPO was smart enough to know that he was harmless, but he put him on hard duty for a while just to appease the other men – no need to cause a mutiny.

  On some south sea isle after the Japs had been cleared out of their caves with flamethrowers and a few grenades, they found an odd-looking piece of radio equipment inside it along with a few charred remaining pages of a manual, written in German. The CPO heard about this and remembered the kid who spoke German and so he had the kid called over to the frigate and showed him the pages, but the kid looked them over and said he could only speak German, not read it beyond a few words he'd seen on his mom's grocery lists, and so they thanked him for trying. But what the young man had told them was not completely true. He could read more German than he let on and he had a hunch what the pages were about - he kenned their core thesis - but what they described was impossible. And if possible, it terrified him. He would've given anything to get his hands on the electronics equipment they found, but he heard them discussing how badly it was damaged and how there were only bits of it left, and they surmised it had been nothing more than some kind of souped up shortwave transmitter/receiver for keeping in touch with the latest gossip from Tojo and Hitler, and counter-intelligence gave them permission to blow it up and dump it to the bottom of the sea.

  And that was that, and after the war he went to electronics school but in his small town they could not teach him anything and he had seen too much of the world and was too smart-ass to listen to book-learning professors, so he signed up for the only place a poor kid with a big brain could get a first class education in a technical field - the Air Force (recently liberated into its own branch of the services - formerly the Army Air Corps). And in one of those million-to-one incidents that sometimes happen in life, the higher-up matched an enlisted man with his aptitude and set him to studying electronics under men who knew the hardware and the math, and he soaked it in like a dry sponge, studying electrons and radiometry and then their applications in communication and navigational systems, and more, and he passed all of their tests and made up lessons of his own and what he learned he sometimes shared but more often kept to himself, because the first thing any enlisted man ever learns is to never volunteer. But from what he knew he rose as high as an enlisted man in his field of service could, and first he had to fix all kinds of shit, and then he had men under him who had to fix all kinds of shit and make sure the squadrons worked, and occupation duty in Japan led to warfare in Korea, and by the end of Korea he was a career man and the Cold War was his employer, and mostly he was tasked with seeing to it that the B-52s remained aloft 24 x 7, always circling the globe, from Guam and from Minot, always ready to drop their H-Bomb payloads on the Ruskies or the Chicoms in case someone got an itchy finger and World War III happened.

  Along the way he got married. He was not a big man but he had a smart mouth and his first wife could have been a Vargas pin-up girl, but she was from at least as low a station as he was, and after a while she hated every minute of life in Guam and Okinawa, and anyway she died giving birth to their only child together, my older brother Ben. And when she died he found out that they had not had much in common but that his heart was still wounded deeply, and he missed the very space she used to occupy, and he felt her ghost in the spaces where she should have been, and he only realized he had loved her very much once she was gone, and then he had his first inkling that life was not only a joke but a cruel one.

  Sometime in the late 1950's, after Korea but before Vietnam, the base CO called him up to his office and there in his office he saw a tall thin man with a narrow clipped moustache and a foreign look and wearing a narrow-lapelled grey suit and holding a stylish fedora in his hand like he hoped he'd be mistaken for Robert Oppenheimer. The man looked over my father like a farmer might appraise a horse at auction and the CO said, "Bohrs meet Bohrs!" My dad looked the man over and realized he was face-to-face with one of the captured German scientists, a Western prize of the war. The scientist could not hide his disdainful gaze but then he put on a smile - a simper - and said a few words in German. When my father answered with the perfunctory returned pleasantries, the man's face got a bit more serious,. He unleashed a jaw-breaking carved-out-of-rock string of ten minutes worth of consonants with only an occasional vowel thrown in and accompanied this with hand gestures and a rise in temperament that mixed fervor with scorn and one could see how Hitler would have figured out how to push his buttons, and when he finished he was winded and he looked pridefully and challengingly at my father like a professor who had decided to play a game of "gotcha" at some poor student's thesis defense, but my dad just shrugged his shoulders. "Leider - ich keine verstehen," he said.

  The German relaxed and smiled a broad, patronizing smile. He turned to the CO. "Thank you so much for letting me make the acquaintance of a distant relative. He is a bright man - a gifted man - and I am proud to have met him. But he would be of no assistance to me and my researches."

  The CO smiled blandly - one more ceremonial thing off his plate for the day - and he turned to and thanked my father. My dad saluted his way back out of the offices and into the tropical air and once there he lit a cigarette and turned the fragment of the big idea the scientist had ranted about over in his mind. "No way in hell I'm helping a damn Nazi scientist and Uncle Sam make a device to talk with the devil," he said.

  He was glad to get back to work on planes.

  His brand was Pall Mall (reds first, then gold).

  During a brief stint of training at an Air Force base in Oklahoma he met his second wife, my mother, who was as different from the Vargas wife as one could imagine, and she had one of the kindest natures God ever doled out, and she was in all ways too good for his smart-ass self, but she brought out the better nature in him because of it, and he found out he could love in a compassionate, nurturing way, and he lost (for a while) his innate tendency to distrust everyone and feel smarter than everyone - because she was smarter than he was or at least her niceness was better than his smartness and came from a place his smartness could never touch, and he knew it and loved her.

  And that is where I came from, and my older sister Tess and my younger sister Janet, and that is how it came that, when Dad retired, he settled back in Oklahoma, to make a house and life for the woman who had put up with twenty years of globe-trotting deployments. But when he lost her he lost everything, and I didn't help him.

  They Made a Machine to Talk to the Dead

  During the war they made the mistake in thinking that, to talk to the dead, you needed some object from the other side to act like a tuning fork, to harmonize the frequencies and thus speak back and forth with the hereafter. They wasted a lot of time digging for something that would work, and lined the pockets of many peddlers in fake artifacts. The truth is they were off the mark. The truth is that you just had to hear the sound of the absolute silence once all the other sounds of life and motion were tuned out. It is surprisi
ngly difficult to do, but once you can do it, you can hear the UnBeing.

  Why would you want to talk to the dead? The point is to get answers from people who cannot or will not talk otherwise. The point is always to answer questions, the first and foremost of which is, "Is there anything after death?"

  The point is to talk to people who can't or won't or didn't talk to you, to answer the questions that nag your life:

  Why won't you talk to me anymore?

  What did I do to offend you?

  Why didn't you say anything before you left me forever?

  The point is not to learn about the future. The point is to excuse what you have already done or plan to do. Oh sure, some people want to know who to marry or what pony to bet on - but there are plenty of other venues for that - dice, tarot, computers. But the point of talking to the void is to know whether anything we did, or ever will do, will matter.

  "Why didn't you say anything before you left me?"

  "What could I have done to make you stay?"

  "If I could unknit the past and make the whole world new again, would you change your mind and be mine forever?"

  These are questions fools will ask, and in compelling answers, let the devil in.