Time Travail Read Online Free PDF Page B

Harvey
hooked up to the induction coil and the transfiguration of dull
daylight minerals into glowing violet jewels. I wanted to see them
that way over and over.
    He humored me but what interested him was
what underlay fluorescence: excited electrons, wavelength and
amplitude, photons, Planck’s constant. I never tired of the rings
of Saturn, a self-sufficient midnight spectacle. Harvey didn’t
bother looking any more. He was beyond or rather beneath spectacle:
into orbital mathematics, gravitation and centrifugal force,
ultimate reality.
     
    Harvey was a straight-A+ student except for
English where he couldn’t do better than a shameful B+. Even though
he shone in grammar (he was great at anything structured) his
compositions had no imagination and Shakespeare and George Eliot
bored him. In math and sciences he was a genius.
    For a while we were in the same math class.
He witnessed my unending humiliation but the spin-off benefit for
me was that I sat next to him and he would sometimes let me copy
during tests. It depended on his mood.
    Harvey’s presence disrupted the class even
though he never opened his mouth. He fascinated the teacher, an old
German refugee stiff as a Prussian officer. It sometimes happened
that Mr Weintraub deliberately stumped us with an impossibly
advanced problem and invited Harvey to the board.
    “No,” he would say, “no,” as Harvey began the
calculation in what must have been an unorthodox way and at some
point the “noes” would stop and then a dubious “yeess” would begin
and then become a dogmatic excited “yes!”
    At the end of a few weeks Harvey disappeared
from our class, a blow because now I had to confront tests on my
own. He was promoted in fast motion to junior and then senior
science and math classes and soon left the students there far
behind. He could have graduated from high school at fifteen but
they reined him back and he got his diploma only at sixteen. He
went to CCNY with the other prodigies.
    By this time we’d begun to drift apart. The
bond of science had loosened.
    We didn’t move in the same circuit, he once
said when I delivered his order of technical books at half
price.
     
    I remember one of the last of our
astronomical sessions. There was a winter sky above us snapping
with stars. We were studying Jupiter with the Newton and at about
midnight Rachel joined us. I invited her to view one of Jupiter’s
mythological love-partners, Io or maybe it was Europa. Harvey stood
apart watching me adjusting the ocular for her. I wanted to tell
her, confidentially, that I was going to show her the heavens.
    “ Jetzt ich zeige dich der
Sternen , ” I say in my awful
German.
    “ Jetzt zeig’ ich dir die
Sterne , ” she corrects automatically. She
breathes O when she looks. I credit myself with indirect authorship
of that little spontaneous cry, so unlike her. She doesn’t retreat
from the clandestine growing proximity of my body to hers because
she’s millions of miles away in outer space.
    That must have been the winter of 1943,
Harvey’s second year in college. I was still desperately trying to
graduate high school. It was in the summer of the year before that
Rachel Rosen had come over to live with the Morgensterns. The
families were vaguely related on his father’s side.
    She was from Vienna originally and in 1938
she and her parents got out in time and took up residence in
France, then she was sent to Lisbon in 1940 in time and then later
to the States. Her parents were caught in France and eventually
went up in smoke. They must have got last-minute consolation at the
thought that their beloved daughter had been spared the same fate.
It goes to show you.
    She was nineteen at the end but looked
younger. She had a cat called Mitzi, a photograph of her parents, a
mathematics textbook her father had written and two dolls which she
placed against her pillow.
     
    I’ll stop there. I won’t let myself get
caught this time as I almost did a while ago with the