The Stone Loves the World by Brian Hall

Author:Brian Hall [Hall, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

1996

God’s in his heaven, Vernon’s in his study.

Vargas lies curled in the padded chair, enjoying the lingering warmth from Vernon’s padded ass. Gen is out for the evening at her so-called Spanish lesson.

All his life he has hated watching other people handle vinyl records. They grip them like Frisbees, rotating them this way and that, their fingers slathering the surface in skin oil and dead cells. Vernon takes the record in its paper sleeve and holds the vinyl-edge against the base of his right palm, supporting the disk from below with middle and pinkie fingers. He pulls the sleeve off with his left hand, allowing it to slide beneath the fingers until—voilà!—he is holding the naked record via edge and label. His ring finger is perfectly positioned for its tip to find the spindle hole. Now, if Vernon wanted, he could throw the sleeve over his shoulder, feint toward the cat, and duck through the linemen’s gap to the stereo, touchdown!, all with the record secure in his hand.

He brushes side A with a damp cotton cloth. (Wet the cloth, wring it out, roll it up inside a larger dry cloth, wring both. Special cleaning fluids and velvety wands sold by stereo stores are a waste of money.) He places the record on the turntable, lowers the needle, adjusts the volume. Sweeps cat from chair, sits, dons headphones, leans back. Beethoven Opus 127.

Vargas jumps into his lap.

Vernon’s former colleague Eugene came back to the lab for a visit a couple of years ago and they took him out to lunch, but the poor son of a bitch was a doddering shell. “When I can’t understand my old papers, show me the door,” Vernon would say to Frances, and she would make that exasperated gesture. She was difficult. Sometimes when she saw him in the morning, she’d say, “Don’t be depressed today, I can’t handle it right now.” It always surprised him. Was it that obvious?

Frances was the only reason he had published anything in the last decade. She arrived in the early eighties, the first woman in the lab—physicist, that is—and you had to be careful with her, she had a chip on her shoulder. She couldn’t write grammatically. You young people and the English language, he would try to joke with her. But she was a good scientist. She noticed a collection of data he had left over from a series of balloon shots he’d done in the seventies. Along with his target range in the near-UV he’d amassed figures for solar irradiance between 2000 and 3100 angstroms at 40 kilometers.

“J. V.,” she said, “why haven’t you published these?”

He told her he’d checked them against Ackerman and Frimout and they didn’t match very well, so he assumed he’d made a mistake somewhere.

She shot him that look. “Your figures are probably better. Nobody’s measured that range as carefully as you have.”

So they collaborated. She crunched the numbers, he introduced her to the subjunctive. They ended up publishing five papers in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

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