(I)
The child was happy. She punched the TV.
“… Police spokesperson Amanda McCauley says yesterday’s incident was racially inspired. Police were called out to disperse two hundred young people from local high schools that had gathered for the after-school altercation. According to police, the conflict was between white youths and another group of mixed races calling itself …”
The child punched the TV again. Diana placed a hand on her shoulder and turned her around. “Come on, Robyn,” she said. “Daddy knows you’re watching. He’ll be home soon.”
She would have turned the television off but she knew the child wouldn’t allow it. Robyn would become wild, soundlessly beating the floor, the furniture, herself.
“… Several youths were taken into custody after numerous weapons were seized. Police would not say what those weapons were …”
How would things change if Robyn were gone, Diana wondered, staring out the window at the pool? With a shiver, she remembered the story of Eric’s dead brother, Warren.
Nothing would change, she decided. It would only create absence – another thing to add to the lengthening list of acquisitions.
No, she realized. That wasn’t right. We would be adding two things – absence and guilt, a new guilt to be placed beside the other. More things to be dispersed, divided as the cell became two and, later, more. Perhaps. Probably. Life’s a tumour that continually grows, she thought. Eric said so.
The child punched the TV again. She was happy.
(II)
The psychologist was calm; placid as the surface of the pool after Warren had drowned.
“You’ve told me what you think everyone else thinks you should do. What do you think you should do?”
Eric hated that question. He had no answer for it. Questions are meant to have answers and this one had none. He hated its unreasonableness. It wouldn’t make for a good news story. He frowned as he tried to think of something to say.
The psychologist smiled. There was no rush. There never was.
“Let’s ask this question, then. What do you want to do?”
“Run away,” Eric said without thinking. He was embarrassed at how quickly it had come out and how truthful it was.
“Why?”
God, how he hated the interminable questioning. It was what he loved about Robyn, his happy child. Herself an eternal question, she asked none. She simply was. Happy. Inexplicable.
“Why?”
“Because … Because …”
“Because?”
“There aren’t any answers to the questions! You keep asking them – but they have no answers! That’s why I want to run! Running’s what we do! In circles, endless circles. To things; from things. To them; from them.”
“Which brings us to the Angeldrome you spoke of last time, mmm? Can you tell me more about it?”
“No …”
“Last time, you said it was your brother Warren who speaks of the Angeldrome. You were upset when I said that Warren is dead. Tell me about that.”
“Warren’s dead, yes …”
“How did he die?”
“He walked into the pool.”
“Yes. But why?”
“Who knows? No one knew what went on in his head.”
“That’s right. He had Angelman Syndrome. That’s why he walked into the pool …”
“No! That’s not why he walked into the pool! That’s why we don’t know why he walked into the pool! There’s a difference!”
“That difference is important to you. Do you know why?”
“Is that all you ask? Why, why, why?”
“I suppose I sound like a broken record. A lot of people get frustrated with the questioning. But if the questions aren’t asked they don’t get answered. Which is what most people hope for. But you came here because of the problems you and your wife are having. You’ve implied that you think your daughter Robyn is the biggest problem …”
Eric sat up. “No! We are her problem. Her life revolves around us. If we split, her world comes apart …”
“Then why the talk of this Angeldrome? And this business of your brother? You said last week he spoke to you. When I pointed out he was dead, you became upset. Don’t you think that is something you should deal with?”
But Warren did speak to him. To Diana too. He spoke of Robyn and the Angeldrome and the Third Law of Thermodynamics. Think of yourself as an engine, Warren had said. Think of the life force as energy. The Third Law states energy is immanent and inexorable in the universe. Every engine is a universe, he added.
Fuck off, Warren.
Don’t mind me, his brother had laughed. I’m dead.
(III)
“Sshhh! Quiet, Robyn, quiet …”
The child was on the floor having another fit. The happiest of children, often Robyn would explode with ecstasy, shooting about the room like a ricocheting rocket, tumbling to the floor with arms and legs flailing, twitching. Tears would stream down her flushed face, her eyes would widen with glee, and her mouth would become a wide and working cavern of silent laughter.
Diana tried to calm her – too much of this was bad. At any moment Robyn could begin to choke, laughing too hard to catch her breath. She might go into seizure – it had happened before.
What was so funny? What was it that made her strange child so happy?
As she reached to subdue Robyn she was assailed by flying limbs. She’d forgotten to remove the child’s shoes. Usually, indoors, they let her go barefoot or in socks for moments like this – and times when Robyn would choose to kick objects for no apparent reason. Now, having forgotten the shoes, the hard little toes and soles slammed like crazy pistons against her upper and lower arms, her breasts, her ribs. She tried to guard her face but the heels of the palms repeatedly found it.
“Oh, please, please Robyn …,” she begged. If this kept up her face would be bruised and she would be housebound for days. Otherwise, neighbours would say Eric had been beating her. They said that last time. They had left leaflets and phone numbers for her.
Eric was on TV and, before Robyn had come, Diana had been too. She and Eric were watched by others. Their tragedy was discussed solemnly.
The others had dull lives. They had no Robyn.
“Robyn! Please …” She felt the anger within her stretching like an animal yawning, preparing to rise from its hibernation. Go back to sleep, she ordered it. This isn’t the time. He’ll be home soon. Then …
The anger was her greatest fear. In her dreams it came out, the beast unleashed as her teeth ground fiercely. In those dreams she beat her child, her happy, helpless child.
“Please don’t, Robyn …” Please don’t let the anger out. Soon, he’ll be home.
“Let me try.”
The voice was behind her. It was always behind her. Soft and reassuring, vague laughter always underlay the comforting modulations. The laughter was like a steady baseline under a melody.
It was Warren again. Warren, who had the queer habit of showing up in moments of crisis. Warren, who had a mysterious ability to connect with Robyn, the unconnected. Warren, who was dead.
Robyn’s whirligig limbs slowed then stopped. Her eyes shone like still pools in morning light. The small mouth remained open in a broad smile. As Warren bent to lift her she had the look of someone transported to a distant land of bliss.
“She’ll be alright,” Warren said soothingly. He turned and grinned at Diana. “It’s energy … and that damned Third Law.”
(IV)
At first, we worked with scripts, Diana thought. Not old plots either but innovative, contemporary stories predicated on the idealism of the inexperienced. Then the old stories slipped in. They didn’t intrude overtly but as sub-text. They had been sufficiently camouflaged to be shady, implied, perhaps not there at all.
It was the unforeseen complication that transformed it all into improvisational theatre. Enter Robyn – laughing, punching, and staring and silent, for she had no lines.
Everything in my life is improvisational now, Diana thought. When she considered it a moment she concluded it always had been. The conceit of a script was merely wishful thinking.
She had begun by studying literature and psychology, loving them both. Somehow, she had wound up with a degree in journalism.
How had that happened, she wondered?
But a career in news had been appealing and she pursued it. It was how she had met Eric. Together, they would relate the world to the world, husbanding their finances, arranging their lives carefully as if each year was a sheet in a datebook. They would have two children. They would have maternity leave. They would have day care.
They had Robyn.
Unlike a 7:30 breakfast meeting, Robyn wasn’t penciled into either of their lives. Eric had been making slightly more than Diana; there had been network overtures. It had been decided Diana would be the one to stay home with Robyn and the mysterious chromosome that whispered “Angelman Syndrome.”
Aloud, neither of them articulated the truth. Diana was overwhelmed by an unexpected, sentimental sense of motherhood and a will-destroying sense of guilt. Eric, for all his well-inflected words and phrases, was simply inept alone with Robyn. For him, fatherhood was posturing. It was not because of vanity; he simply didn’t know how to act. He, too, experienced guilt though for him it was emasculating. Each day he wanted to apologize to the world for rising, dressing, breathing.
Only Robyn was untroubled. She was happy.
They thought. No one really knew what Robyn felt. No one had access to her universe. Until Warren came – Warren, who was dead.
(V)
“How did you know he was Warren? After all, it’s not every day a person comes back from the dead. And it had been a long time.”
“He was Warren. I knew. Not right away but later, when I saw him with Robyn, I knew.”
“What do you mean not right away?”
“Well, like you say, it was 18 years and people don’t usually come back after dying. But it wasn’t just his being there. It’s how he is there. The way he acts. The way he always shows up when we need him, or Robyn needs him – I’m not sure which it is. But it’s always when the three of us are interacting, like planets looking for their proper orbits. Or matter trying to organize itself in a pattern but not quite able to.”
“Interesting imagery …”
“It’s Warren’s. All the ideas are his. He talks that way, though you’re never quite sure if he’s serious or not. It’s like this life – yours, mine, everyone’s – was something he wasn’t really interested in. It’s an opening act. You watch it because it’s there but it’s not what you’re waiting for.”
“And what’s Warren waiting for?”
“Robyn, of course. The way that woman was waiting for him just before he went into the pool.”
“You think he’s going to drown Robyn.”
“Oh, they don’t drown. Thermodynamics, as he’d say. First Law.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I. I’m just repeating what Warren says.”
“I have a problem tying all this together – Robyn, orbits, these laws…”
“It’s all about Robyn.”
“How?”
“That would be the Second Law.”
“The Second Law…?”
“The business of entropy. Energy, life as Warren would put it, is leaking out of her (out of all of us for that matter). That’s what the fits are all about. When you’re in the Angeldrome you struggle for organizing principles. It’s as if everything was a Chinese box. The universe is actually an infinite number of universes each with its own infinite number within it… and so on. The Angeldrome is that mental space where you recognize it and start running. But not running as we know it. Though it’s literal it’s also metaphorical. Electrons run, you know. Orbits.
“In running, a particular universe tries to maintain its position relative to the others, like a planet in a solar system. Just like you and me and everything else. We’re all billions of electrons whizzing about in billions of orbits around billions of centres… the Chinese box. Each of these universes tries to maintain its orbit and the ones within it. But all orbits decay – the entropy thing. It’s inevitable, yet despite that inevitability there is a persistent compulsion to fight it. Robyn’s fits are her attempts to stay where she is, in her particular orbit. Yet they’re also her yearning to get to that other orbit in that other universe, where she needs to be. Where Warren is. Warren is here as a guide for her.”
“Where do you and your wife fit into this?”
“I’m not sure. I think it has to do with something Warren said, ‘How can the centre hold when there is no centre?’ But I can’t figure it out. Any thoughts?”
“Well, no. But I do think you may need more help than I can give. I’ve not been practicing long.“
(VI)
The first reports were considered nonsense since the data was suspect. It wasn’t so much that the data was wrong as it was sparse and vague. The conclusions were seen as unsubstantiated and unnecessarily alarmist. They were considered poor science.
Still, data accumulated and after a time the suspect conclusions became the embarrassed scientific community’s conclusions. One of their number was quoted as saying, “The universe has become a cartoon. I don’t know what else to say.”
The problems with the sun were several, though they all were part of a larger one. Their problem remained undetermined. The mythic orb was found to be wobbling on its axis. It was like a skilled drunk trying to maintain self-control. Only a discerning eye could detect its unbalanced movement from one side to the other. The variations from the sun’s normal position were slight, hard to perceive, and essentially dismissed until the next phase came – solar distention. Again, the changes were minor but this time, small though they were, they were inescapable.
The sun was flattening like a beach ball under intense pressure, then elongating along its axis like a clown’s balloon. The variations the sun incorporated into its heavenly display were monitored over a period of two years, every few months bringing some new element into the equation. Flares from the surface became increasingly dynamic. It was as if the sun had succumbed to a wild and virulent flatulence.
Around the world media broadcasts were disrupted – there was rioting in Japan and New York when the World Series could not be picked up. The American President wasn’t able to follow the progress of his defeat in his own state’s primaries. The Academy Awards were seen only in Brazil.
The consternated world struggled with other puzzlers too. Incidents of spontaneous combustion became epidemic. Worse, they received thorough empirical documentation and were not confined to humanity.
Parrots burst into flame for no apparent reason. A National Geographic crew making a documentary in Nepal managed to film three snow leopards as they became a tripartite conflagration. Fire departments were exhausted putting out florist shops in shopping malls. The senseless transformation of any matter to fire, and then ash, stumped everyone, scientists and fantasists alike.
The universe was coming undone like a shoe lace that loosens slowly. It unknots quietly causing a foot to miss a step. A body then falls with a thud against glass making someone leap into the street at the sound. A car skids to an unsuccessful halt as other cars collide behind… and so on.
In Eric and Diana’s house their afflicted child had more and more fits of ecstasy; she had terrifying seizures that left her paralytic for hours. Warren’s stays became longer until it seemed he was always there, waiting.
Talk of separation continued between Eric and Diana, at breakfast, dinner, in bed. All their conversations had the quality of nostalgia as if the husband and wife were speaking not of an impending, possible future but of a possible past, sentimental and not quite real.
(VII)
Eric and Diana were in the kitchen by the window. Outside Robyn sat on the black inner tube playing an imaginary game. She was on the grass not far from the pool. Warren was somewhere, they weren’t sure where. But he was near. They knew that.
Diana spoke.
“It’s not us. We are not the problem. And neither is she.”
“Of course not,” Eric agreed. His thoughts were embroiled in the endless questions, as if he were in thick brush that goes on forever.
Diana was thinking of plays and of how Eric’s answers tended not to give another much to work with. Improvisation was difficult with Eric.
“A trial period would be good,” she said. The thought of dividing everything was daunting. The energy it would require was simply too much, impossible with the fact of Robyn insinuated in their lives. Separation was better; it was neither here nor there. The division of property could be postponed; the inevitable depression muted.
“Yes,” Eric agreed. “I’ll move out. Get an apartment.”
“Mmm,” Diana murmured absentmindedly.
“I think it would be a mistake, you know.”
Diana turned to Warren, who was behind her. “We shouldn’t separate…?”
“Well, not for the reasons you’re thinking of…”
“Why?” Eric always felt ill at ease speaking with Warren. It was always difficult to grasp his meaning and Eric sensed that that was deliberate.
“The centre,” his brother said smiling.
“‘How can it hold?’” Eric mimicked. “I know, I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I know I don’t,” Diana threw in.
Eric glared at Warren. “Why not just say what you want to say?”
“You assume I mean the centre isn’t holding because there is no centre,” his dead brother answered. “Couldn’t I be asking about how that happens when there is no centre?”
Eric blinked as Diana, finding the play and its improvisations bewildering, turned to look out the window at Robyn.
Like a raconteur at a small gathering, Warren continued, “What if the centre and the object orbiting it are interchangeable? What if they’re the same thing, that only perspective makes them seem different?”
Perspective is everything, Eric thought. Anytime he ran into a problem he found himself coping by trying to approach it in a new way. He looked for a different way of seeing it.
He found it disturbing that this time, with the question of Robyn, he hadn’t once tried seeing it from another angle. It had never even occurred to him.
“Everything is related,” he said to Warren suddenly. “Isn’t it?”
Warren didn’t answer. He simply remained where he was, watching Eric and waiting. Diana was looking out the window, her lips slightly parted.
“Everything is related,” Eric continued. “One story, many sidebars. True?”
Warren smiled. “I can’t answer your questions, Eric. In the end, even if I could, you wouldn’t want me to. All I can tell you is it’s all the Third Law of Thermodynamics, though it’s actually the First Law. In a way it’s like a concerto by Chopin numbered backwards. It’s all about thermodynamics. Entropy is in there too. The Second Law.”
“I should have studied physics at university.”
“Or metaphysics.”
“Eric? Warren?”
Eric turned to his wife. Her voice was soft and had an odd quality to it.
“It’s Robyn,” she said.
Eric stepped up to the window beside his wife and looked out at his daughter. Improbably, she hovered a few feet off the ground above the dark inner tube. Her arms were spread and her head was tilted back. Bliss was impressed on her face. Her mouth was open and the small teeth gleamed in the sun as she laughed soundlessly.
It was another ecstatic seizure, only this time she was levitating somehow. On the other side of the pool Warren stood. He was grinning at her warmly. His arms were open as if in welcome.
As with everything else, Eric found it impossible. Warren was a few feet behind him in the kitchen. Turning to confirm it, Eric saw that his brother was gone.
(VIII)
They said his brother was sick. But Eric knew he was happy. Warren was always laughing. He rolled around and kicked and his parents called them fits, but Eric saw that Warren was happy. His face was like the people he sometimes saw in cartoons – laughing largely, eyes wide with fun.
It was Eric who found Warren in the backyard. He had gone out and there, in the pool, the small body floated like a boat in a bathtub.
“I’ve been waiting,” the woman said. “I don’t have long.”
Eric gave her a puzzled look. He wasn’t really afraid. He felt confused and a little irritated by it. It was like he sometimes felt in school when he struggled with a question he couldn’t find the answer to. But he wasn’t afraid. Very young, he was only puzzled by Warren’s passiveness.
“I knew you would be first, the one to find him,” the woman said, glancing at the pool. “So I waited to tell you some things, though they won’t make much sense to you now. One day they might. If you remember. But maybe not.”
The woman looked like his mother did – about the same age, a summer dress like she sometimes wore, mid-length hair drawn back by barrettes. Blue tinted earrings, small and oval, clung to the lobes of her ears.
“Warren was lucky,” she said. “He wasn’t anchored like most people are. He could move, and chose to move, from one world to another.”
Eric’s nose scrunched up as if he’d smelled something bad. But it was just his frowning at what the woman said. He didn’t understand her.
Recognizing his confusion, she laughed. “Like I said, I don’t expect this to make sense to you now. Maybe not ever. But you might remember, one day.”
She bent over and with a fist tapped at the pool’s concrete edge.
“It all seems so solid, doesn’t it?” She stood back up. “But it’s not. Nothing is. It’s all moving. Changing. Going from here to there. Warren’s gone from here to there.”
She looked up to the sky and squinted at the brightness of the sun. “It all changes. Moves. Even the things that seem most eternal.”
Eric’s eyes met hers as she looked back down and across at him.
“There are so many worlds, Eric. We couldn’t count them even if we wanted to. And as one goes out another comes into being. This one’s about used up. Maybe it makes more sense to say worn out. Tired. But it will go on, like Warren, here or there. Some like to call it thermodynamics.” She smiled. “Whatever that means.”
Strangely, the woman began to fade as the mist does when dawn becomes morning then midday.
“It’s nothing to worry about, Eric. It’s something to be thankful for.”
Eric watched as she dissipated, then, taking a long last look at Warren’s body in the pool, he went into the house.
“Warren is gone from here to there,” he told his parents, then spent the rest of the day in his room hiding from the sobbing and dark, silent activity of the stricken house.
(IX)
He looked back out the window.
Warren stood waiting for Robyn across the pool.
While beside him his wife stared dully, Eric watched as his daughter floated above and across the pool to his dead brother. Warren’s arms embraced her as she reached him and Eric heard her let out a wordless squeal of glee.
Beneath his feet Eric felt movement in the floor and he heard a low rumbling that made him think of a sleeping giant waking. He felt the foundation of the house stir and his ears caught the suggestively soft jingle of disturbed lamps and cutlery.
His hands reached out and grabbed the counter as Diana stood beside him oblivious to the queer vibrations.
Glancing back up, he looked out the window again. Warren had put Robyn back on the ground. His daughter seemed lost to a tarantismic madness, flinging arms and legs wildly, squirming in a frenzy and finally slamming her head repeatedly against the tiled edge of the pool.
“Robyn!” he yelled and ran for the door.
As he burst outside he saw his daughter slam her head one last time as Warren beamed above her. Then, seeming to lose whatever sense she had of where she was, she fell to her side and into the pool.
Without thinking, Eric ran and splashed into the shallow end. Moving forward, water holding him back, he saw the surface slowly still where Robyn had fallen, blood from her forehead streaming in thin ribbons through the water.
The pool’s floor suddenly dropped and Eric began a stroking motion with his arms. He was hampered by the suit and shoes he still wore. Though the pool was not overly large, his progress seemed preposterously slow.
Finally getting to where Robyn had fallen, he stopped, treading water, looking for his daughter.
She wasn’t there.
He looked wildly about but couldn’t see her. He turned to Warren and screamed, “Where is she?” but Warren only smiled back and said, “Thermodynamics – laws one through three.” He shrugged and mouthed the word, “Angeldrome.”
Frantic and furious, Eric dove and searched the pool’s bottom but there was no Robyn. Surfacing, he looked at Warren again, began to ask once more where she was, but stopped as he saw his dead brother fading like an afterimage caused by an intense light.
“Warren…?” he muttered, but his brother merely shrugged again and pointed up at the house.
Eric turned and saw Diana stepping out of the door. She looked like a lost child who had been wandering aimlessly for hours.
Diana was headed for the pool, her steps small and uninspired. Indifferently, she stepped into the chlorine water. As she continued it rose above her ankles, her knees, then above her shoulders as she moved into the deep end and broke the water with a breaststroke. Eric became instantly aware of the heavy weight his sodden clothes were on him. Suddenly he was enormously tired.
He met his wife in the pool. They wrapped arms around one another and held each other tightly. They both knew Robyn was no more, as Warren was too.
“They’re gone,” Eric said aloud. “Like escaping heat,” he added, surprising himself with the simile.
As one, he and Diana moved to the side of the pool to get out. Together, they felt a final shutter move through the pool and all the earth, everywhere. They saw their house collapse in on itself with a soft exhalation, dust in small, weary puffs rising from it. Eric was surprised it hadn’t made more noise then dismissed the thought. He cared only for getting out of the pool with Diana.
Lying on the tile by the pool’s edge, both breathed heavily as they waited to recover from their intense fatigue. When they sat up they saw the small body, face down, floating silently in the pool. Robyn’s corpse was exactly where Eric had been searching – obvious and looking like an abandoned water toy. For a moment he thought the body was his brother Warren then realized he had confused it with memory. Warren had been years ago. This was now.
As he began to cry, Eric wished Warren was there to argue with. He wanted to say, no, you’re wrong. He wanted to point at Robyn and say, see? There is the center. That is the center that has been there all along. Not the body of my daughter, but this moment with the body of my daughter in it.
“Thermodynamics,” Diana said beside him. “That’s what he said, wasn’t it?”
Eric waved his hands in dismissal.
But Diana was smiling beside him and he was thinking of engines and universes and his dead brother’s claims about immanence and inexorability. He wished he understood.
More than that, he wished he had understood Robyn. He wished he had understood, if only for an instant, what her universe was like, what she had felt. In the face of an unfeeling, decaying reality, why had she been happy, blissfully happy, while he and Diana had ceaselessly fought?
The word “Angeldrome” rose up in his thoughts like something buoyant to the surface of a pool. For a moment Eric felt he had some understanding – not intellectually, perhaps, but in his being, in what he was. Angeldrome, he thought. Yes. Where you run; where you’re always running – but not away. You run simply to run, to make the engine work, to keep it working and push the energy through the machine.
And some is lost. Entropy, of course. But never really lost, only transformed, existing forever as another thing, as Robyn and Warren did – elsewhere, in a world someone like Eric could never quite believe in.
1992
— THE END —
(The story Angeldrome first appeared in On Spec Magazine – #13 Summer 1993 vol. 5 no. 2)