Spin / megan busbice

Spin

“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.

“It’s a bit different front the immunotherapy approach,” he said.

I traced the bump at my wrist, a vein poking out naively from behind the thin veil of my skin. There’s so much hubris in my biology. That vein assumed that nothing will rip my wrists open and expose it to the world and the fury of this cancer-filled sky.

David finally finished, lapsing into silence. My dad’s hands were tight on the wheel as he navigated our North Carolinian monsoon. It was my turn to talk; responsibility once again fell to my shoulders. But it felt less heavy this time.

I turned around in my seat to face him. I didn’t bother to rearrange my facial features; David knew the truth when he saw it.

“You’re going to cure cancer,” I said. The words came easily because I meant them.

David smiled and it was a quiet but triumphant thing. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. The years had worn out this comfortable hollow in the air between us, an appreciation for the subtle and sincere. I didn’t have to pretend to be anything. Neither did he.

My dad turned into David’s driveway and a bright red umbrella came to greet us, a tall woman with pointedly blonde hair waving at the car. David opened the door without a word and stood next to his mother outside, his skinny frame ducking under the cover from the rain.

“Thanks for driving him,” she said.

“No problem,” my father replied.

David and I looked at each other and looked away. The rain traced rivers through the lawn and galaxies down the windshield. My mouth was suddenly both full and empty of words. My lips were embroidered shut with red thread. I couldn’t decide what to say, because somehow, this felt like an ending, like a goodbye in some uncertain and definite way. He shut the door and began to walk away, and my dad put the car in reverse. David’s silhouette, hunched under the red umbrella, faded into the distance.

“It’s called a spin, you see?” He’d said. “Because as soon as one particle spins in one direction, the matching particle spins in the other direction. Equal and opposite.”

We would see each other again.