by Mark Dorset
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Memory, Mush, and Peas
by Peter Leroy
[Editor’s Note: In this excerpt from Where Do You Stop? , Peter
Leroy recalls the struggle to capture an elusive memory that led to the
writing of that book. —MD]
 OMETIMES
my memory seems to be mush, with shining moments scattered through it like
chips of marble in wet cement or peas stirred into mashed potatoes. I'd
like to be able to take a closer look at some of those moments, but whenever
I reach for one I disturb the mush, and the moment I seek sometimes sinks
out of sight. I reach, I scoop, I grab. Sometimes I get what I'm after,
but more often I come up with nothing but mush, or I get hold of a different
moment, not the one I wanted. Reaching for a chip of marble, I come up
with a pea.
Once in a while, though, something--some random turbulence
in the mush, perhaps--brings to the top a chip that surprises me, one I
haven't looked for, but one I'm happy to see, like the one that surfaced
on a fall morning about two years ago while I was sitting in the sun, reading
the Babbington Reporter--the chip that led me to write this book.
Albertine's parents were visiting, it was a fine morning,
and we were all having breakfast on the new deck behind the hotel. Albertine
and I have come to enjoy the early days of fall more than any other part
of the year. The weather is still fine but there are few guests at the
hotel, so there isn't all that much for us to do--beyond entertaining her
parents on their annual visit.
Mr. and Mrs. Gaudet--Martin and Anna--are very fond of
me, and I milk their fondness for all it's worth. That morning, I was lingering
over my breakfast, enjoying the sun. Martin padded into the kitchen to
fetch me more coffee, Anna spread marmalade on my high-fiber toast,
and I turned to "We Pay a Call," the Reporter's weekly interview
with an interesting Babbingtonian. That week, the Reporter had called
on Vivian Stillwell, only daughter of the entertainers Florence Hill and
Fred Lucas.
Flo and Freddie, as they'd been known professionally,
had been enormously popular as radio performers and, later, in the early
days of television, ended their career as co-hosts of a daytime show. The
interviewer wanted to talk about Vivian's collection of Flo-and-Freddie
memorabilia, but Vivian kept trying to steer him away from what she referred
to as "that old junk" and into the cellar, where she had her laboratory,
her cold fusion experiments, and her homemade scanning tunneling microscope,
or STM.
Vivian's STM allowed her to examine matter on an atomic
scale, thanks to a tungsten probe cunningly sharpened to a point just a
single atom across. When she applied voltage to this probe, electrons left
the tip and, exploiting some quantum-mechanical hocus-pocus, "tunneled"
across the narrow gap between the probe and the specimen. While Vivian
guided the probe across the specimen in a raster pattern, a system of piezoelectric
controls, a feedback generator, and some other clever gadgetry produced
images so fine that they allowed her to see individual atoms.
All that I found interesting enough, but here's the part
that really got me. "To begin a scan," said Vivian with undisguised pride,
"I've got to maneuver the tip of the probe into position only about one
nanometer--that's a billionth of a meter, pal--above the specimen--so close
that the electron clouds of the atom at the tip of the probe and of the
nearest atom of the specimen overlap."
When I read those words, my jaw dropped, and I let the
Reporter fall into my lap. My eyes drifted out of focus. A feeling of the
most pleasant nostalgia spread through me. An extremely vivid pictorial
memory lit up my mind's eye like the final starburst at the end of the
annual Clam Fest fireworks display. A little smile formed on my face.
"Peter!" said Mrs. Gaudet.
"What?" I said, or squeaked, certain that the little smile
had betrayed my thoughts, thoughts best kept from Albertine's mother.
"Your toast," she said. "It's
getting cold."
"Oh," said I, relieved. "That. Well. That's nothing."
"Nothing?" she said.
"I mean--thank you. Thank you. I--was just--ah--"
"You've been in another world,"
she said. "I know."
"You mean the--uh--the way I kind of drifted off?" I said.
"I can explain that--I--"
"Your head's in the clouds," said Anna. "I know what you
were thinking about, too."
"Heh-heh-heh," said I. "Well, Anna, you're a woman of
the world. I'm sure you understand that--"
"The next book," she said triumphantly.
"I guess you caught me," I said, relieved that she hadn't.
"Oh, I know how your mind works," she claimed. "I've known
you quite a long time, Peter. I can tell what you're thinking by the expression
on your face."
I said nothing at all to that, just smiled and ate my
toast and drank my coffee, but the truth was
that the little smile that had nearly given me away came from the dazzling
memory of Miss Rheingold's legs.
Miss Rheingold's legs had come to mind because Vivian
Stillwell's description of her atomic-level imaging system had made me
say to myself, "Hey, wait a minute! If the electron clouds of an atom in
the tip and the closest bit of the specimen overlap, what has happened
to the boundary between tip and specimen? How can we say where the tip
stops and the specimen starts?"
That thought immediately led to another. It made me think
of an old obligation undischarged: the paper I was supposed to write for
Miss Rheingold, who taught me general science for part of the seventh grade
and had those unforgettable legs. From that beginning I rambled on and
on and on through that time of my life. It wasn't long before I came upon
something that made me laugh out loud.
"What's so funny?" said a voice, but the wrong voice for
the memory.
"Huh? What?" I said, looking around. I had expected to
hear the voice of my old friend Raskol, as a boy, calling to me from a
rickety tower on a hilltop in the middle of a grove of bamboo, but it was
Albertine's father who was asking me the question, smiling at me from across
the bistro table where we sat. "Oh," I said. "I'm sorry, Martin. It's--um--well,
Anna can tell you--it's just as she said--I'm thinking of the next book--in
fact, I'm thinking of the end of the next book."
This time I was telling the truth. I closed my eyes and
resumed my backward ramble until I found myself standing in a locker in
the Purlieu Street School, in the heat of an August night. Because I was
ten, I fit in a locker, though without much space to spare. If I moved,
the coat hook would poke into the back of my neck, but I didn't move much,
because I didn't want to make any noise. I was where I wasn't supposed
to be, and I couldn't allow myself to be discovered. I was not afraid,
though. I was thrilled. I was playing a game with the watchman. I was thrilled,
too, as an adult reliving the moment, because I knew what I couldn't have
known at the time, that while I was there, hiding in that locker, I was
gathering impressions that would lead--a year later--to my inventing a
game and thereby to my building a permanent memorial, a beacon, marking
a single moment of my childhood. This memorial beacon would also be my
seventh-grade science project, the final requirement of my general science
paper, though at the time when I was standing in the locker the paper hadn't
been assigned yet, and when it was assigned it would take about thirty-five
years to finish.
THINGS LEFT UNDONE--how they haunt us. At any rate, they haunt me. I've
noticed that they don't haunt everyone else. A great many people seem to
be able to walk through their days without hearing at their heels the dogged
shuffle of neglected duties, but I am not a member of that lighthearted
crew. The things I ought to have done are there behind me always, each
with a hook in me, holding on with a thin but sturdy line, dragging along
behind me, a nagging reminder of a debt I ought to pay to the past before
I pack up and move on to something new. So, it is a happy occasion when
I get an opportunity to clip one of those strings and leave a millstone
in the dust.
I had left Miss Rheingold's general science paper unfinished
all those years ago because its requirements were so daunting and bewildering.
It was much more demanding than anything I had encountered in school before
I encountered Miss Rheingold. For one thing, the paper had to be quite
long, and until she came along my classmates and I had grown accustomed
to working in a shorter form--one side of a sheet of paper with widely
spaced lines. I liked that form just fine. I could take in all my work
at a glance and check it for the seamless integration of ideas that I worked
to achieve. Now I was going to have to blather on about a single subject
for far longer than I thought I could.
For another thing, the paper had no fixed deadline. We
were to turn it in when we thought it was ready for Miss Rheingold to read.
This meant that we had to impose a kind of discipline on ourselves that
none of us was accustomed to: we had to work until the job was finished--but
we didn't really know what finished meant. We had never had to decide when
a job was finished before. It had been finished when the time was up. Finished
meant no more than ended. Often it just meant that the bell had rung.
For yet another thing--and this is the main thing that
kept me from turning the paper in while Miss Rheingold was still around
to receive it--the paper had to include a project, either an experiment
or a demonstration, that illustrated its thesis. I didn't devise a project
that satisfied me until after the school year was over and Miss Rheingold
was gone (in fact, I didn't even realize that the project I had devised
was the project I needed to complete my paper until that morning when I
was sitting on the deck with Albertine's parents, remembering Miss Rheingold's
legs).
Finally, and most exasperatingly, the paper had to answer
an enormous, nearly imponderable question, the one that is the title of
this book. If it seems like a simple question to you, try thinking about
it with a ten- or eleven-year-old brain. Well, where are the edges of things?
Where in space-time, for instance, does one phase of your life end and
another begin? Where do you mark the onset of an idea, a discovery? Where
do you mark the end of a belief? Where does my table end and the keyboard
of my computer begin? Vivian's description of her homemade STM set me to
pondering such questions all over again, and that was the start of my work
on this book--or was it? Perhaps my work on this book really started with
my work on Miss Rheingold's science assignment. Perhaps it began even earlier.
Regardless of when it began, it is now, I think, finished at last.
I am astonished at how long this book became. I tried
to cut some of the details, but I couldn't eliminate split session, the
broadcasting career of Flo and Freddie, the drumlin in our back yard, my
lighthouse, the terrazzo floor of the Purlieu Street School, splines, green
blackboards, Miss Rheingold's legs and perfume, the smell of new pencils,
shandy, Quanto the Minimum , Elementary Introductory
Physics Made Easy for Beginners (Book One), Marvin's mother's redfish
court bouillon, my mother's business ventures, fried baloney, Ariane's
hip, or Kap'n Klam's flirtation
with hamburgers, and despite my cuts I think there may still be too many
gadgets in here, but I couldn't eliminate any of the ones that appeared
on "Fantastic Contraptions," or the windup record player, the combination
locks on the lockers in the school, the flour bomb, my Shackleton Superba,
the Lodkochnikovs' television set, or the windflowers, and so this book
is as long as it is, which is, I hope, just as long as it ought to be.
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