Relativity (29 page)

“Sandpipers are migratory birds; they're always chasing summer. When it's winter down here, they fly to Europe and Asia where it's warm.”

“No way. But it's tiny. How can it fly all the way across the world and know where to go?”

“Apparently migratory birds can see Earth's magnetism and orient themselves in the right direction. Like an internal compass.”

Ethan crouched down near the sandpiper, carefully observing it move. The bird bobbed its head. “They can really see magnetic fields? With their eyes?”

“Might be with their eyes, maybe their beaks. Nobody knows exactly how they detect variations in the Earth's magnetic field.”

“Awesome.”

The boy watched the sandpiper forage in the earth, poking and probing, stiff-winged and dark-eyed. With his lips slightly parted and attentive gaze, Ethan was the clearest distillation of his parents: Mark could see the best of himself in his son's awestruck face; he saw Claire in his focus. He was sad he'd lost something Ethan still had—curiosity, the naïve wonder of a child. To be able to marvel at the smallest miracles, to look at a sandpiper and stand in awe at the beauty of nature's mysteries.

As they watched the bird fly away, Ethan smiled at Mark. The smile threw him. Mark wanted to explain to his son where he'd been all this time, how he'd wanted to watch him grow up, would've loved to be his dad. Things just hadn't gone exactly to plan.

But as they stood there on Observatory Hill, an ibis pecking at their feet, it turned out to be far easier to not say anything at all. They shared the silence and watched the traffic together, lanes of cars roaring from the city toward the yawning iron mouth of the Sydney Harbor Bridge.

Ω

ETHAN COULDN'T LOOK
at his father for more than two seconds in a row. Not just because he didn't want Mark to catch him staring—discover the confused state of flux written on his face—but mostly because whenever they made eye contact, it hurt Ethan's eyes. It felt like looking directly at the sun, how exposure to its ultraviolet light caused damage to the retina. Then Ethan remembered his retinas had already been damaged once. This man had done something to hurt his brain. Thinking about that made Ethan feel scared but he wasn't sure if it was a real reason to be afraid of Mark.

As a small child, Ethan had a crippling fear of the dark. He wouldn't walk down dark hallways alone; his night light stayed on until sunrise the following day. Mum would hold his hand, always promised there were no monsters under the bed. He didn't know why he'd been scared, he just knew something terrifying lurked in the shadows. But whenever Ethan switched the light on, there was never anything there. His fear of nothing made him feel silly. There weren't any monsters hiding in the dark.

Mark's knee knocked against Ethan's leg under the table. He didn't feel very prepared to meet his dad. “Prepared” was the wrong word anyway. You prepared a cake: followed a recipe, measured the ingredients, baked it in the oven. You'd know when the cake was ready—its sweet aroma would fill the air, its batter would solidify. But Ethan couldn't smell the air and know he was ready like a cake. He felt raw and unprepared. This meeting wasn't playing out like he'd imagined inside his head. Everything he said to Mark sounded dumb. And he thought he should be more afraid of his father but something about Mark put him at ease. Ethan felt silly, like when the light came on and nothing was there after all.

They overdosed on McDonald's and Ethan's stomach ached. Talking to his father made him nervous. So instead of speaking, Ethan took mouthful after mouthful of food. Mark smiled at him and Ethan wondered how that smile should make him feel; it didn't feel the same as a smile from his mum. He gulped, trying to digest his feelings.

“Have you had enough?” Mark asked, turning to face him. There was a thin scar on the side of his face.

“Yeah, I'm full,” Ethan said. He wanted to ask about the scar but didn't.

“This park hasn't changed much since I was a kid.” His father stood up and brushed crumbs off his jeans. “Want to go for a walk?”

Ethan nodded.

“My mum used to bring me here. I sprained my ankle in this park. Twice.”

“I've sprained my ankle too. Running along Narrawallee Beach.”

It was a vivid memory. Ethan and his mum visited that beach one freezing July day as they drove back up the South Coast from Melbourne to Sydney. The swell was huge, the surf was wild; she wouldn't let him swim. Ethan ran toward the shore and into the sea breeze—salt in his mouth, cheeks turned pink from the cold—but Mum stayed behind. She sat on the dunes, wind blowing through her hair, and looked out at the waves. Damp sand crumbled at his feet as Ethan ran and he rolled his ankle in a ditch. Ligaments tore; he wailed. Mum ran over to him and carried him back to the car. She bought him a rainbow Popsicle from the local shop.

“Narrawallee,” Mark said. “I've been there with your mother too.”

That was weird. Mum hadn't said anything about that. Ethan never really thought much about his parents having a life together before he existed. But they must have. Was Mum thinking about his father while she sat on the dunes and looked at the water? Maybe his parents were happy back then, before he'd been born. Maybe they ate rainbow Popsicles on the beach and ran across the sand without spraining their ankles.

Mark walked toward the play equipment. “Follow me.”

Ethan watched his father stride ahead. He could see clear panels enveloping them—fields of positive and negative currents and charges, attracting and repelling each other—but he didn't say anything about the electromagnetic field hanging in the air to Mark.

“Hold this for me?” Mark handed Ethan his sweater. He climbed over a maze of blue plastic and red ropes and over to the swings.

Ethan made sure his dad wasn't looking and held the sweater up to his nose. He inhaled quickly. This was his father's smell—soap, wool, wood—which was different from Mum's. He tried to store the scent in his memory.

Mark sat on the swing seat. The black rubber band distorted around his backside. “You've played on the swings before, right?”

“Yeah, obviously,” Ethan replied, half-offended and half-confused by his question. “I'm twelve. I might even be too old to play on the swings now, you know.”

Mark's hands gripped the rusty chains. He seemed puzzled by Ethan's reaction but continued anyway. “Do you know what's happening to your body when you're on a swing?”

Ethan hesitated; he wasn't sure what his father wanted to know. You push against the ground, point your feet toward the sky, and swing. There wasn't much more to it than that.

“Come sit next to me. I want to show you something.” Mark grabbed the chains of the swing beside him and offered them to Ethan.

Ethan positioned himself on the seat of the swing, careful not to place his body too far forward or backward. He curled his fingers around each chain; the metal rings were cold in his hands. With his feet, he pulled his body back before he pushed himself into the air, pumping his legs until he was in full flight, swinging back and forth in a steady trajectory.

“I'm oscillating,” he said.

Mark laughed. “That's right. Now stop moving your legs.”

Ethan pulled his feet in and he started to slow down. Eventually, he came to a halt. His feet slid along the ground; gravel flew into the air.

“I'm not sure what you were trying to show me.”

“Let me try to explain.” Mark tilted his body back and started to swing. Feet tucked in. Feet turned out. Feet tucked in. Feet turned out. “The swing pushes on me, and I'm pushing on the swing too. You try. Tell me what you can feel.”

The warm air hit Ethan's face as he swung back and forth. “Torque, angular momentum, and gravity. Obviously.”

“Wow,” Mark said as he swung his own body higher. “But to make sure you keep swinging higher, you need to apply a little bit of force at the end of each swing. Know what I mean?”

“Yeah.” That last-minute pump of the legs.

Mark yelled across the swing set. “And when you're in that in-between place, where you're not going up and you're not going down, something amazing happens.”

“What?”

“For a tiny moment, you're weightless.”

“Technically that's wrong,” said Ethan. “I weigh ninety pounds.”

“But for a fraction of a second—between swinging forward and backward—the forces of gravity, friction, and air resistance bring the velocity of the swing to zero. Weightlessness. Just like you're in space. You're flying. That's what I wanted to explain.” Mark smiled at him. “Ethan, I know I'm a little bit late, but if you give me a chance now, I could teach you to fly.”

Even though Ethan knew he shouldn't believe it, even though it all sounded a little lame, this man knew how to talk to him. Mark spoke Ethan's language; they were the same. A magnetic thrill leaped from his chest. As Ethan swung up into the sky with his father beside him, he'd never felt higher in his life.

A thick lump lodged in the back of his throat. Ethan tried to suppress it, but suddenly his eyes were swollen with tears. He started to cry. No, stop it. Crying was against the rules.

Growing up, Ethan tried his best to be a boyish boy. He played with trucks and rockets and trains, he kicked balls and scuffed his shoes, he collected rocks and sticks. Although Ethan liked those things anyway, he also knew he was obeying the rules. Rules for being a boy. And if he followed these rules, people wouldn't notice that something was missing.

He'd heard a teacher once say that you could tell when a boy doesn't have a father; young boys always needed a strong male role model. Ethan knew he didn't have either of those. Nobody taught him any curriculum for how to be a man. At school, he listened to friends' stories about weekends fishing with their dads, building furniture together, watching football. He longed for that alliance, man-to-man, more than anything else. Ethan wanted it so much that what he already had—the person who loved him, his mum, who didn't care about the rules for being a boy—sometimes wasn't enough.

Mark stopped swinging. “What's wrong?”

Ethan wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “Nothing.” He pushed his voice an octave lower that it really was.

“Did I say something to upset you?”

Ethan shook his head. He was so embarrassed and couldn't look at his father again; crying wasn't tough. What would his dad think of him now? He'd find out his son was a wimp. A freak. Ethan kicked the gravel. “It's just,” he began. The words sat, congealed, in the back of his mouth. “It's just you seem like a really nice person.”

Mark looked away.

“I mean, you are a nice person.” Ethan backtracked. That came out wrong, he needed to reverse those words. Great, now he'd upset his father plus made himself look like a crybaby. “I don't know. I guess I don't understand. It doesn't make sense to me. That since you're such a nice person, you did that really bad thing.”

His father didn't respond. Maybe Mark hadn't heard anything Ethan said; maybe Ethan hadn't said his thoughts out loud.

Mark stood up. “Have you ever been to the Observatory?”

“No, never.”

“I used to go all the time when I was just a bit older than you, when I was in high school. Someday I'll bring you here at night so we can look at the stars.”

“Really? I'd like that.”

“Anyway, I once spoke to an astronomer at the Observatory who was writing down the coordinates of stars and galaxies. But I noticed he used a formula to correct the positions, so I asked him why. He told me that because of gravity's effect on the electromagnetic spectrum, mass bends light. So through the telescope, it looks as though a star is in a different place to its actual position.”

“Yeah, I know. That's the gravitational deflection of light.”

“Ethan, you're a very smart boy,” Mark said. “Way smarter than I was at your age. I really wanted to be a good father to you. And I haven't been, and that's my fault. But not everything was my fault. I'm not sure what your mother has told you, but I never hurt you. The doctors were wrong. I didn't do it.”

Ethan looked at the Observatory's green dome and thought about the hardened lies of bending light. Einstein showed that the sun's gravity distorted the entire sky, proving that gravity wasn't really a force at all. Before that, nobody questioned Newton—things that went up had to come down—but Newton was wrong, things bent.

Theories were disproven all the time, Ethan thought. Sometimes everything we thought we knew turned out to be a colossal mistake. Indivisible and indestructible atoms, that light came from our eyes, a heliocentric universe—all those theories were incorrect and superseded by something else. There were no universal truths, just views of the world yet to be proven wrong.

“I have to go home,” Ethan said. “Before it gets too late.”

“I didn't mean to upset you.”

“You didn't. Physics is figuring out how to ask the right questions. Einstein had to prove the ether didn't exist to figure out that the speed of light was constant.”

Mark scratched at his temple. “I'll walk you back to the bus stop.”

Back at Circular Quay, they said good-bye and attempted a clumsy hug. Neither of them knew how to navigate the other's arms. Seagulls pecked at the footpath. The bus arrived and Ethan boarded. He waved at Mark from the window. After the second traffic light, his father disappeared from sight.

Ethan buzzed for the rest of his journey home. He felt like he'd drunk every liter in every river and every lake after spending years dying of thirst, like he'd just solved an impossible mathematical problem. Discovered some kind of grand unification theory. Now he knew the truth. His father had never hurt him. Everything—about who Ethan was, where he came from—finally made sense. Now he just had to figure out how to prove it to everyone else.