MEGAN BUSBICE
Sp i n
“T
ell us about your research,” my father said. I heard David shift in the backseat; he took a breath. And then he began. He explained quantum mechanics and carbon nanotubes and biomedical engineering with the ease of practice and fascination. David’s voice was steady and clever and kind, the voice of a teacher, and I leaned back in my seat, glad to have the responsibility for conversation taken off my shoulders. I tipped my head toward the window and listened. The evening sky was faded by the sheet of clouds, rain prophesized by the stillness of the leaves on the trees and the silence in the air. I closed my eyes absorbed David’s words. He didn’t seem to mind my quiet attention. “It’s called a spin, you see?” he said. “Because as soon as one particle spins in one direction, the matching particle spins in the other direction. Equal and opposite.” Somewhere in the heavens, the Jenga blocks collapsed, and rain dropped pounding on the windshield, sudden and furious. My father listened to David but slowed the car as the visibility smudged to gray. David didn’t stop, merely raising his voice. I traced the outline of a raindrop on the window. “It started with my grandmother,” he admitted, “When she died.” Years ago. I remembered it now. He was smaller then, skinny elbows and big eyes, perfect handwriting that made me jealous. I remember wondering why he wasn’t at school that day. My mother whispered to me, David’s grandmother died. Cancer. Nothing could be done. They were close. I remember looking away, trite words of sympathy falling and failing, stumbling from my lips. In the end, what can you really say? Words don’t change death. “The nanotechnology allows you to pinpoint the tumor,” he explained. My father hummed understanding and I was saved from responding, allowed to remain in quiet existence, trying to soak in this timelessness through osmosis. The angry cumulonimbi were cottony tumors in the sky, twisted with gray poison, and the world seemed pale and translucent like too-stretched skin.
24
