Amanda Filipacchi - Vapor

During dinner, my mother said, “Andy, what does your work consist of, exactly? I’m fascinated.”

“I build telescopes and detectors to see the sky in X ray. These optical systems are then sent out of the atmosphere to gather their information. Now I’m working on a European project called XMM, which stands for X-ray Multi-Mirror. It has three co-aligned telescopes, two of which will be equipped with reflection grating spectrometers. Those spectrometers are what I’m working on. It’s really a spectroscopic mission, rather than an imaging one. The imaging missions always bring back nice pictures and are good for P.R., but spectroscopy doesn’t excite the public much. Nevertheless, it is the spectroscopy that produces the most scientific breakthroughs. Usually black holes could only be identified spectroscopically, for example. Anyway, it’s really a big project involving scientists from many countries, and it’ll be launched in two years or so. Nothing like the small homemade experiments that I launched on sounding rockets in the past. Those were like bottle rockets by comparison.”

Damon seemed to greatly enjoy describing his fictitious job. He even added, “It’s a very sexy field.”

“It does sound sexy,” said my father.

“Sexy like fencing. The same kind of sexy,” said Damon.

My father nodded, and my mother dreamily said, “Yeah.”

As Damon continued describing his work animatedly, he became less careful with his gloved hand; he moved it naturally, as if it were not gloved, which was a big mistake. In allowing his hand to move so naturally, he was actually allowing it to look very unnatural: he didn’t notice that where the glove covered his absent index finger it remained, at all times, stiff and pointing. Damon and I had talked about this phenomenon and that he would have to be careful about it. But he was not being careful enough. To my distress, I noticed my father’s gaze rest upon the straight, frozen finger, and then, to my horror, I noticed that his eyes would not leave that finger. As soon as Damon noticed my father’s gaze, his other fingers froze as well. He stopped talking, drank, and desperately resumed his occupational explanations, trying to recapture my father’s interest: “I’m interested in observing the life cycle of stars and the gases that they’re made of. You see, stars form out of collapsing clouds in the galaxy.”

“Clouds of what?” asked my mother.

“Mostly hydrogen,” answered Damon, “and small amounts of other elements, like helium, carbon, oxygen, and dust. Often the cloud material is in molecular phase. When the clouds’ self-gravity exceeds their sustaining pressure, they tend to collapse, give off heat, and when they become dense enough, they begin to burn and turn into stars. The less dense parts of the clouds might be blown away by the stars’ radiation pressure.”

I couldn’t believe he was talking so much about clouds, a topic too close to his real occupation, which I had finally told my parents about, after my escape. I was sitting too far from him to kick him under the table, so I shook my head at him, mouthing the word cloud .

He immediately changed the topic: “I used to work at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, doing surface physics with Dr. Dennis Zilkha. There I spent months measuring surface reactions between oxygen and this wonder-alloy nickel aluminum. For a while there was a lot of interest in nickel aluminum. It’s light, has high-tensile strength, and is resistant to heat, so there were plenty of potential applications for it as a material.”

Damon had not succeeded in diverting my father’s attention from his finger for even a second, and now Damon was becoming distressed. How did this distress manifest itself? He unbuttoned a button on his shirt. My mother, who still had not noticed his pointing finger, did clearly notice the unbuttoning. My father, vice versa.

Damon shifted in his seat. He was suffocating subtly, and so discreetly. He lowered his ungloved hand under the table and was doing something there with it, and because I knew him, I knew that he was trying to take off his pants. It was tragic. His gloved hand remained in sight; I’m sure he was too afraid to move it, in case it broke the spell of paralysis that seemed to have befallen my father. Damon was still talking about experimental astrophysics, which didn’t work on my mother, who looked surprised and uncomfortable, but politely didn’t say so; and which was wasted on my father, who wasn’t about to notice any undressing, as long as the finger remained rigid. Consequently, Damon was being driven mad. As casually as he could, he pushed his shirt off one shoulder. His ungloved hand was back under the table and he was clearly trying to lower his pants, but he was having a hard time of it without getting up. Out of frustration, he yanked his shirt off his other shoulder, causing the fabric to stretch across his torso, where the next button, looking ready to pop off, was holding the two halves together. Both of his shoulders were now bare.

My father got up from his chair and went to the kitchen, saying, “Does anyone want garlic salt?” He came back carrying the garlic salt and his fencing epée. He sat down, sprinkled some garlic salt on his food, and asked Damon if he wanted some.

Damon said, “No thanks,” and went on compulsively: “There are all kinds of cool ways to tell what’s happening on surfaces, like Auger electron spectroscopy [AES], X ray photoelectron spectroscopy [XPS], and low-energy electron diffraction [LEED]. You can measure the chemical environment of surface atoms using XPS, literally see the surface order with LEED diffraction patterns, and get complete surface atomic composition with AES—”

Damon stopped talking when my father took his sword, slid it between Damon’s index and middle fingers, and bent Damon’s empty glove finger backward until it was flat against the top of his hand. Everyone was silent.

“You’re Damon,” announced my father, red-faced, full of outrage and triumph.

Damon jumped up from his chair. He had successfully lowered his pants. He now finished taking them off, and then his shirt, and then his underwear. His boots had been taken off ages ago and were lying under the table. Lastly, he whipped off his glove, which for an instant revealed his amputation, and ran out of the apartment (which was on the ground floor), and through the lobby, stark naked.

The stripping was what saved him: my parents were still in their chairs, too stunned to move. I grabbed a raincoat from the hall closet and chased after him. He had run past the doorman, who was laughing when I passed.

I found Damon huddling in a doorway a few doors down the street. I wrapped him in the raincoat, which unfortunately was black and opaque. He pushed it away, saying, “I can’t.” He was crying.

I walked with him, trying to hold the raincoat around him, to cover him up as much as possible.

“Don’t touch me with it,” he kept repeating and punching it where it happened to touch his skin.

I was annoyed at myself for not having brought his transparent clothes as a precautionary measure. Who did I think he was: a normal person?

When Damon calmed down slightly, we stopped at a corner to get a cab. While I tried to hail one, I ordered Damon to hold the raincoat in front of him, shielding the oncoming traffic from his nudity, which of course did no such favor to the pedestrians and shopkeepers behind him, where a small crowd soon gathered.

A cab finally stopped and took us to my apartment building. Before we got out, I luckily noticed, also disembarking, my parents, who had just arrived in another cab. I begged our driver to speed us away. My parents shoved themselves back into their cab and sped after us. It didn’t take us long to lose them.