Orbital Theory
for Ethan
Nonfiction by Cal Freeman
Nonfiction by Cal Freeman
She told me the boy was coming home, from Pittsburgh of all places, and it wasn’t that I’d forgotten that the boy had moved there, but that boys are always coming home according to classical and biblical precedent (Telemachus, The Prodigal Son), a boy is always staying or coming home or temporarily leaving home in the fashion of the lengthy return.
I told her my godmother had lived in Pittsburgh thirty years ago, had moved there before being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and may have begged strangers for change at the foot of the Andy Warhol Bridge, likely begged for change at the foot of several of many bridges after losing her nannying job at the home of the wealthy family in Squirrel Hill, but I said may and likely because all this was apocryphal or third hand. Nobody knew precisely what she did there, and she wasn’t exactly reliable as sources go. This aunt, Nancy, may not have been a nanny at all, may have engaged in some kind of homonymical fantasy involving the occupation as it was portrayed in old Disney films. Her return to Michigan was preceded by a hospitalization after the voices in her head suggested she try to drive her car into a river valley.
The boy’s return was preceded by chores and cleaning, scrubbing of various sorts upon various surfaces (vinyl, ceramic, maple, drywall) and a disagreement about optimal sponges, whether the Mr. Clean Magic Erasers or the Scotch-Brite heavy duty sponges were the best, whether to handle dust with a feather duster, a paper towel, or a shop vac complemented by one of the other implements, an argument about whether a should be affixed to paper towel or if it should be pluralized with an s given that nobody could effectively collect dust with a single ply from the roll, we also discussed whether paper towel minus the indefinite article implied plurality thus relegating the s to redundancy. We came to no decision while bludgeoning each other with the broomsticks of divergent prescriptive grammars.
The boy called as we were talking to report from the I-80 turnpike in Ohio that a truck carrying lumber in its bed had lost its tarp in the windstorm and blinded him momentarily but luckily before the situation turned worse a subsequent gust of wind had lifted the tarp from his car and harmlessly deposited it on the shoulder of the turnpike, the car he was driving was a 2018 Ford Escape with an Ecoboost that essentially stalls the engine when it stops at lights in order to save fuel, a feature that both of his parents hated when we ended up driving his car when he came home for these breaks, he and she both hated that feature but appreciated having his car around in order to save miles on our own lease vehicles procured for us by one James Flynn of Village Ford in Dearborn, MI, a skilled and honest man.
The boy returns home in a windstorm is a tired trope but it only got tired because of the countless times it has happened through the ages, Greyhound return stories lack the gravitas of stories of return via train, train stories are utterly implausible, every vehicle one arrives home in becomes a tenorless vehicle in a hopeful metaphor, which is to say the telltale tenor called regret. It’s never uncomplicated fun, this returning home, and the hopeful gesture is rarely deftly executed, as though delivered instead by an aged tennis player or a clay maquette whose ball-and-socket shoulder joint on the dominant side is gummed and immobile, whose immobility does not ultimately get it cut from the low-budget monster film. The low-budget monster we are all creating of our pasts, I was going to say, to put it like that.
In the dream the night before the boy returned the phrase that kept coming up was kamera obscura, kamera obscura and not camera obscura. It meant a simultaneous erasure and capture, not an image projected by a pinhole of light in a dark and vacuous box. It meant the excesses of the face smeared with unthinking light. It meant a toddler searching behind a framed picture of his mother for dimensionality, for a waist, hips, and legs.
On his way to the toll booth a tractor trailer popped like a firework or a gun as it let out its air brakes. Weeks ago I might’ve said that there isn’t much to wake in us, but if you listen to the right radio program there’s nothing quotidian about what’s happening in diplomacy or sports. Every act is at least as important as a contested three-pointer or the final leg of a long haul.
Two months ago the boy bought me a book about molecular chemistry, and I’ve been reading about atomic and molecular orbits, p and s electron shells, tiring of the way the text has me imagining beetles and clouds to ground and dissipate the concepts. Because of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle electron locations within atomic or molecular orbits are probabilities as opposed to facts, possible locations that take on the circuitous properties of interstates and their arcing complements: I-80, I-280, I-75, I-275; and, concomitantly, brumous cities like Pittsburgh, Toledo, Flatrock, Detroit, Sault Ste Marie; rivers such as the northern branch of The Cuyahoga, The Maumee, The St. Mary’s.
Being entranced by any metaphor involving hybrid orbitals on a travel day is intellectually dishonest, nearly parodic, but just earnest enough to activate an image of a domestic world. This box of dust and light we call a home and occasionally return to at approximately the same time, the decades of that foreshortening the more of it. I misread the old gusts are pushing through again as the old guests, but I embraced the error and wrote down how the old guests were swiftly leaving on the wind, causing all manner of angle strain both anionic and cationic in the sharing of resources resulting in uneven but effective bonds. This wasn’t an expression of regret, precisely. Regret is a proliferation of hydrocarbons I cannot name, regret is a 109.5-degree ideal and my face warped by the angle strain endemic to the axical orbit, the probabilistic location of my stepson on a highway or in a cloud through which he’ll say, Yes, I’ll be in that city on that very holiday armed with this dense lexicon through which we can conduct our shared anxieties and doubts.
I told her my godmother had lived in Pittsburgh thirty years ago, had moved there before being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and may have begged strangers for change at the foot of the Andy Warhol Bridge, likely begged for change at the foot of several of many bridges after losing her nannying job at the home of the wealthy family in Squirrel Hill, but I said may and likely because all this was apocryphal or third hand. Nobody knew precisely what she did there, and she wasn’t exactly reliable as sources go. This aunt, Nancy, may not have been a nanny at all, may have engaged in some kind of homonymical fantasy involving the occupation as it was portrayed in old Disney films. Her return to Michigan was preceded by a hospitalization after the voices in her head suggested she try to drive her car into a river valley.
The boy’s return was preceded by chores and cleaning, scrubbing of various sorts upon various surfaces (vinyl, ceramic, maple, drywall) and a disagreement about optimal sponges, whether the Mr. Clean Magic Erasers or the Scotch-Brite heavy duty sponges were the best, whether to handle dust with a feather duster, a paper towel, or a shop vac complemented by one of the other implements, an argument about whether a should be affixed to paper towel or if it should be pluralized with an s given that nobody could effectively collect dust with a single ply from the roll, we also discussed whether paper towel minus the indefinite article implied plurality thus relegating the s to redundancy. We came to no decision while bludgeoning each other with the broomsticks of divergent prescriptive grammars.
The boy called as we were talking to report from the I-80 turnpike in Ohio that a truck carrying lumber in its bed had lost its tarp in the windstorm and blinded him momentarily but luckily before the situation turned worse a subsequent gust of wind had lifted the tarp from his car and harmlessly deposited it on the shoulder of the turnpike, the car he was driving was a 2018 Ford Escape with an Ecoboost that essentially stalls the engine when it stops at lights in order to save fuel, a feature that both of his parents hated when we ended up driving his car when he came home for these breaks, he and she both hated that feature but appreciated having his car around in order to save miles on our own lease vehicles procured for us by one James Flynn of Village Ford in Dearborn, MI, a skilled and honest man.
The boy returns home in a windstorm is a tired trope but it only got tired because of the countless times it has happened through the ages, Greyhound return stories lack the gravitas of stories of return via train, train stories are utterly implausible, every vehicle one arrives home in becomes a tenorless vehicle in a hopeful metaphor, which is to say the telltale tenor called regret. It’s never uncomplicated fun, this returning home, and the hopeful gesture is rarely deftly executed, as though delivered instead by an aged tennis player or a clay maquette whose ball-and-socket shoulder joint on the dominant side is gummed and immobile, whose immobility does not ultimately get it cut from the low-budget monster film. The low-budget monster we are all creating of our pasts, I was going to say, to put it like that.
In the dream the night before the boy returned the phrase that kept coming up was kamera obscura, kamera obscura and not camera obscura. It meant a simultaneous erasure and capture, not an image projected by a pinhole of light in a dark and vacuous box. It meant the excesses of the face smeared with unthinking light. It meant a toddler searching behind a framed picture of his mother for dimensionality, for a waist, hips, and legs.
On his way to the toll booth a tractor trailer popped like a firework or a gun as it let out its air brakes. Weeks ago I might’ve said that there isn’t much to wake in us, but if you listen to the right radio program there’s nothing quotidian about what’s happening in diplomacy or sports. Every act is at least as important as a contested three-pointer or the final leg of a long haul.
Two months ago the boy bought me a book about molecular chemistry, and I’ve been reading about atomic and molecular orbits, p and s electron shells, tiring of the way the text has me imagining beetles and clouds to ground and dissipate the concepts. Because of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle electron locations within atomic or molecular orbits are probabilities as opposed to facts, possible locations that take on the circuitous properties of interstates and their arcing complements: I-80, I-280, I-75, I-275; and, concomitantly, brumous cities like Pittsburgh, Toledo, Flatrock, Detroit, Sault Ste Marie; rivers such as the northern branch of The Cuyahoga, The Maumee, The St. Mary’s.
Being entranced by any metaphor involving hybrid orbitals on a travel day is intellectually dishonest, nearly parodic, but just earnest enough to activate an image of a domestic world. This box of dust and light we call a home and occasionally return to at approximately the same time, the decades of that foreshortening the more of it. I misread the old gusts are pushing through again as the old guests, but I embraced the error and wrote down how the old guests were swiftly leaving on the wind, causing all manner of angle strain both anionic and cationic in the sharing of resources resulting in uneven but effective bonds. This wasn’t an expression of regret, precisely. Regret is a proliferation of hydrocarbons I cannot name, regret is a 109.5-degree ideal and my face warped by the angle strain endemic to the axical orbit, the probabilistic location of my stepson on a highway or in a cloud through which he’ll say, Yes, I’ll be in that city on that very holiday armed with this dense lexicon through which we can conduct our shared anxieties and doubts.
About the writer
Cal Freeman is the author of the books Brother of Leaving and Fight Songs. His writing has appeared in many journals including Southword, The Moth, Passages North, The Journal, Hippocampus, Drunken Boat, and The Poetry Review. He currently serves as music editor of The Museum of Americana and teaches at Oakland University.
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