Driving Mr. Albert by Michael Paterniti

Author:Michael Paterniti [Paterniti, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

The snow is nuclear-powered, driving horizontally, starring the windows with ice, piling up until the Skylark looks like a soap-flake duck float in a Memorial Day parade gone terribly wrong. Everything is heaped in the frigid no-smell of winter, cars skidding, then running off roadsides into gullies. The snow falls in thick sheaves, icicles jag tree branches, like the memory of a day 500,000 years ago when all of Kansas was freeze-dried under hundreds of feet of ice.

It’s packed at the Village Inn Pancake House: college students and the elderly and everyone in between: all flannel-shirted how-are-ya’s ricocheting everywhere, steak-and-egg specials zooming by on superwhite plates. Some of the old men wear work pants and baseball caps with automotive labels; the undergrads sport caps emblazoned with team names or slogans like Whatever or Good to Go or Rage. Even in the No Smoking section everyone smokes—one of Harvey’s pet peeves. And yet, there’s so much warmth in numbers this morning, so much well-being, that it’s hard to hold a grudge. Outside, it’s howling, and inside we’re basking in the golden light of camaraderie and flapjacks.

Take your hallowed halls of Congress or the littered floor of the Stock Exchange, America is built on its pancake houses!

Our restaurant routine usually follows a familiar pattern, which doesn’t waver this morning: Harvey meditates over the menu, examining it, dissecting, vectoring, and equating what his stomach really wants. Meanwhile, I get a newspaper and skim a few sections before he’s ready to order. Even as two teenagers have been indicted for the murder and dismemberment of a man in Central Park, there’s an ongoing existential debate raging in Harvey’s head: salty or sweet, eggs or waffles.

Occasionally, after a particularly deliberate order, he’ll deliberately change it. Luckily, our waitress is a pathologically smiley KU student, well-versed in the dynamics of a breakfast rush, the coffee-craving, caffeine-induced chaology of it all. She waits as Harvey takes a second look at the menu. It could be that an actual week passes as he clears his throat a couple of times, then ponders some more, but she smiles patiently and then chirps back, “Eggs over easy, bacon, wheat toast, home fries. More coffee?”

It’s hard to imagine that fine people like her were blown to smithereens twenty years ago in a nuclear attack concocted for a panic-inspiring, made-for-television movie starring Jason Robards, called The Day After. The few who survived wandered in a post-apocalyptic stupor, in rags, bodies flowered with keloid scars, trying to find a shot glass of clean water. That Lawrence would become connected in the nation’s psyche with nuclear devastation, and that Einstein’s brain, the power that unknowingly wrought the bomb, resided here for many years under Harvey’s midwestern protectorship, is a small pixel of irony that seems to escape Harvey. When I ask him about it, he says, “Way-ell, I guess that’s true, all right.”

The truth is that Einstein himself was confounded by the idea that his theory of relativity had opened up a Pandora’s box of assured annihilation.

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