The Unknowns Read Online Free PDF

sleeping bag on the pleather couch. “I’m about to turn fourteen.”
    “Are you sure?” he asked. “I got a letter from them…” He began to leaf through a pile of paper on his desk, the one containing W2forms and notices from the DMV. “Here it is:
Congratulations on your child’s admission to Dr. Martin Luther King Junior High School
.”
    “That doesn’t mean it’s a junior high school,” I said. “It means it’s a high school named after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
    “Well, I’m sure you’re right,” he said. “You must be getting pretty smart if you’re passing that test and everything.” He walked over to the corner where the fridge and stove were, where the floor was linoleum instead of carpet. The first time I saw my dad’s apartment, when I was eight, I learned that the word
kitchen
is functional rather than ontological, although I wouldn’t have put it like that at the time. He rifled through the TV dinners in the freezer and took out one for me: meatloaf and mashed potatoes, the variety I’d named as my favorite six years earlier. By now I was a little sick of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, but I never said anything about it, just like I never said I hated being at my dad’s house. Saying it would have raised questions I didn’t want raised, like
How incompetent was my dad anyway
? and
Did my mother maybe appreciate the chance to spend every other weekend without me
? So I ate the meatloaf, although I had eaten it so many times that I had begun to identify the constituent parts of its flavor and texture—the meaty roundness, the sugar, the fatty gloss that held the slice together—and to imagine them as individual powders and solutions in jars on a shelf in the Stouffer’s lab.
    In the first year after the divorce, Dad had occasionally and with much fanfare planned outings to minor-league baseball games or the science museum. It was an Abilene paradox: each of us would have preferred to stay inside, but we went on these awkward excursions in deference to what we thought were one another’s wishes. Eventually he got me a Nintendo, and now we rarely left the apartment.
    After dinner I was in the middle of a particularly deep game of Arkanoid when I became aware of him lurking in the doorway. He obviously wanted to say something, which made it impossible to concentrate. When the ball split into three I made the beginner’smistake of trying to follow them all, instead of picking the two that were furthest out of phase and abandoning the third, and lost my last life.
    He was leaning against the doorframe with a shy, hopeful expression, like he wanted to ask someone to dance. In the past few years he had become pear-shaped; all the substance had drained out of his head and shoulders and settled in his hips.
    “Wanna see something?” he said.
    Spread out on the table in the living-room area were a bunch of typewritten pages, pencil sketches, legal documents. “I’m starting a business,” he said. There was a quality in his voice I’d never heard before—pride, maybe.
    He wanted to walk me through it, so I let him. He’d been looking at some beverage-industry case studies for a class he was teaching when he had this eureka-type vision: in a moment of hallucinogenic omniscience, he saw the entire structure of the industry laid out in front of him, like a beehive in cross section, and he could perceive wormholes and inefficiencies that were invisible to normal men. Everyone knew the big soda companies were just selling sugar water, that Coke’s vaunted “secret formula” was a load of marketing hooey—over the past five years they’d gradually replaced the cane sugar with high-fructose corn syrup (cheaper, thanks to sugar tariffs and corn subsidies), and not one of fifty million Coke loyalists had noticed the difference. The conventional wisdom held that it was all about advertising:
branding
, they were calling it now, linking your product with youth and fun and sexual