The Digging Leviathan Read Online Free PDF Page B

notion of cleaning the place up, but were looking for treasures—for odds and ends of mechanical debris to add to the bucket in Gill’s garage. Nine-tenths of the collection that afternoon consisted of bottle caps of the sort lined with little cork washers that could be pried out and used for remarkable purposes. It was possible, for instance, to clamp a bottle cap to a shirt by separating the washer from the cap, then reinserting it with a layer of shirt in between. On that Saturday in the park William Hastings wentwild for the idea, and by the time both of them had had enough treasure hunting each sported fifteen or twenty bottle cap insignias like campaigners at a political convention in support of soft drinks.
    Jim’s mother would roll her eyes in feigned uncertainty, as if both of them might belong in a padded room for getting up to such tricks. She would agree after their continued insistence to wear one herself, at least until they arrived at the planetarium.
    So Jim and his father, their collecting at an end, set out merrily down the trail toward where Jim’s mother, having complained of an unidentifiable ache, was resting and reading her book—Balzac, Jim recalled, which she read in French. The two came bursting up, emblazoned with bottle caps, and found her asleep. At least Jim supposed she was asleep. He set out to make a racket—whistling, shouting to his father who wasn’t ten feet behind, and commenting aloud about the outstanding collection in the sack. He rummaged in it and found the skeleton of a bladeless clasp knife, the bone shell of the handle having broken away from one rusty side.
    For some reason his father never made the mistake of assuming her to be asleep. Perhaps it was the position in which she lay. The next half hour seemed to Jim a sort of numb stage play in which his father, for ten grim minutes, worked to revive her, then sat beside her for another twenty, staring blankly into the twisted branches of the leafless oak against which Jim stood.
    Finally two rangers summoned from the Park Service by passing hikers carried his mother on a stretcher to-a waiting ambulance and away to Metropolitan Hospital where she was pronounced dead. Jim and his father were met there by Uncle Edward. Jim could picture every dreary, white and chromium moment of the two or three hours he spent at the hospital. Two years later they seemed to mean nothing at all to him, to be completely removed from any memories of his mother. He knew little of the workings of the human heart, and it was inexplicable that hers should have stopped like a clock that had wound down. When the three of them drove silently and wearily home that night, Jim and his father were still dotted with bottle caps. His uncle hadn’t enough sense of humor left in him to ask about them. Jim could see, two years later at the meeting of the Newtonians, that his father still wore two of the caps affixed to his shirt—a White Rock cream soda and a NehiOrange. He wished guiltily and sadly that his father would button his coat.
    But William Hastings was for once oblivious to that fateful afternoon in the park—something that had pursued him through the two years since—and was carrying on about a story he intended to write. Roycroft Squires nodded and squinted and messed with his pipe, shoving a big wad of curly black tobacco into the enormous bowl carved into the head of an armadillo, and tamped it down first with his thumb and then with the business end of a sixteen-penny nail.
    “As I understand it,” said William, puffing on his own pipe, “relativity is a fairly simple business. But I have an angle on it that will knock you out.”
    Squires nodded, ready to be knocked out.
    “Now, as an object approaches the speed of light,” said William, hunching forward and poking his pipestem in Squires’ direction, “its mass increases proportionately, which is to say it simply gets bigger and bigger. Swells like a balloon, if you follow. And