Thought Experiments

Photo By Henry Storck on Unsplash

Pretend you’re in an elevator skipping through the ether. Pretend there’s a cat in a box. Pretend you’re chasing a beam of light. Pretend your older brothers are separated as children, plucked out of a diner booth. Pretend one of them is placed inside a rocket ship and sent to outer space. Pretend he travels at the speed of light. Pretend the rest of you remain on Earth. Pretend you go to high school, college, fall in love with the wrong person, change your major, spend a summer in Greece alone, go to the only grad school that offers you funding, attend your brother’s wedding in Saginaw, hook up with the bride’s cousin in an elevator while his wife is on the dance floor, jam the buttons so hard the alarm goes off and security is called and a scene is made, never live this down, never get invited to your brother’s events again, drop out of your PhD halfway through, escape with an MA in lit, teach at three different colleges to pay your rent, learn to live without health insurance, grow old, grow old, grow old.

I wander through Mom’s gallery opening, gazing at paintings that look exactly like the same paintings she’s been making for the last fifteen years. Ever since my brother Bill died, her subjects have veered toward the apocalyptic. Fires, floods, barren cityscapes. On the other side of the gallery, my brother Drake wanders with his wife, Marion. Drake and Bill were identical twins. The kind no one could tell apart unless they had different haircuts. His wife still hates me for the wedding. Some people can never move past things.

I’m absorbing Mom’s poisonous lawns and microplastics when Dad appears beside me, clutching an Amstel Light. He nods at a painting of a nuclear power plant slipping into the ocean.
“Nuclear power’s clean,” he says. “She’s only perpetuating stereotypes.”

“Not if it falls into the ocean,” I say.

Dad sips his beer and harrumphs. He’s a tenured history professor at a state college that keeps slashing humanities programs. He prides himself on staying afloat. Most of his students are STEM majors. They love his classes.

After the gallery, we eat dinner at our favorite spot in Little Italy. We order big bowls of Caesar salad and pasta with red sauce. The server is new. He doesn’t know our family. He forgets the anchovies. He doesn’t bring our second bottle of wine. He pours everyone limoncello, even though Mom is the only one who wants it. Once we’re on tiramisu, we have too many forks and not enough spoons.

“Gwen,” Dad says, clutching an empty glass, “pass the wine?”

My phone buzzes. A student. I swipe it open. Computer problems. This is my fault for having weekly writings due at 11:59 p.m. on Fridays. Drake reaches for the bottle and passes it to Marion, who tops her own glass off. She then passes it to Dad, who shakes what little remains into his glass. He holds the empty bottle and frowns at me.

I rest my phone. “It’s a student,” I say.

Dad swirls an inch of merlot in his glass. “You’re emailing a student on a Friday night?”

“She can’t submit the assignment. I don’t want it to ruin her weekend.”

“Good god. You’re part of the problem, you know that?”

Mom draws a fork through the mascarpone, creating tiny mushroom clouds. “Frank,” she says, “let her teach the way she wants to teach.”

Dad tilts his glass. “You think you’re helping them, but you’re not. You’re only encouraging their learned incompetence. It’s sink or swim out there, Gwen. You want to help them—let them sink.”
And everyone is quiet after that.

Dad doesn’t apologize. He never does. The waiter drops the check. Across the dining room, a vacuum whirrs to life. Candles are extinguished, cloths disappear from tables. Suddenly, we’re in one of Mom’s paintings: a lone family surrounded by darkness.

Drake and Marion leave first, citing a thirty-minute drive and a babysitter to pay. I walk to the parking lot with Mom and Dad. It started snowing while we were inside and our cars are covered. The pavement is slick. I turn my engine on and blast the heat. The snow brush is tucked in the backseat, beneath a mess of books and folders.

Dad has already started the engine of his Accord. We both shuffle snow off our windshields. Mom digs her hands into her pockets and traipses into the empty parking spot between our cars.

“So, Gwen,” she says, “when will we see you next?”

“I don’t know,” I say, clearing the passenger windows. “I’ve got a conference next weekend, so I’ll be playing catch-up when I get back.”

Dad brushes his back window. “Gwen, when was the last time you got an oil change?”

“What conference?” Mom asks.

“Nothing,” I say. “A small journal thing in Columbus.”

“Sounds like you got a cat caught in your engine.”

Mom glances at Dad. “Frank, aren’t you going to Columbus next weekend?”

He taps the brush against the rear tire. “Yeah, but that’s for whoosh.”

The red sauce and limoncello burn my stomach. Until now, I’ve never heard anyone pronounce WOSH aloud. I always thought it’d be “wash.” My fingers are wet clams. I finish clearing the back window of my hatchback.

“Whoosh?” I ask. “You mean Writing on Science and Humanities?”

Dad tosses the brush in his backseat. “You got into whoosh? What for?”

“I wrote an article about science and poetry.”

“Whoosh,” he says, “is the top conference for scientific historians. It’s not for English professors—” He stops himself. The snow keeps falling. “Instructors,” he says.

Bill was the poet, but no one remembers that about him. He was seventeen when he died. Hit his head cliff diving in the lake. Although it happened in the summer, our high school hosted the service on the football field so everyone could attend. It reminded me of a pep rally. The popular kids took the mic and shared stories about Bill—most of them involving goals he scored, races he won, pranks he played on teammates. A few teachers and coaches also shared anecdotes. How he was a class clown, but always an attentive student. Uncle Nick and Aunt Sabrina gave a PowerPoint about some tree they planted in Spain in Bill’s honor. Drake didn’t want to talk, nor did Mom and Dad. I thought somebody should represent the side of Bill he rarely showed.

The mic was squeaky. Up too high. One of the track coaches had to help me adjust it to my height. I was so nervous I forgot to explain that I was reading Bill’s poems, not my own.

Afterward, everyone approached to tell me how beautiful and touching my poetry was. Popular kids, upperclassmen, ones I never, ever thought I’d have a reason to talk to. I was too embarrassed to confess. Who would know the difference?

The Thursday before the conference, I’m driving from one college to another when my engine stalls out in front of the Health and Sciences Building. My Triple-A membership lapsed after a misunderstanding with a pushy customer service rep last year, so I pay for an overpriced tow to a garage three blocks off campus. After leaving my name and number with a frazzled, gray-haired mechanic who says, “Gary does this, Gary’s who you gotta talk to,” I take the bus to teach my class at the private college.

The next morning, Gary calls to say he’ll need to order a part. I won’t have the car back until Monday, Tuesday maybe. I look up buses to Columbus. None of them go anywhere near the conference.

I call Drake. He says, “I’m about to hop on a Zoom.”

“Can I borrow your car tomorrow?” I say. “I’m going to Columbus.”

“No, I got pickleball.”

“Can’t Marion drive you?”

“Can’t you ask Mom and Dad?”

We go back and forth until he hangs up on me to start his Zoom. Later, I’m riding the bus to the community college when Mom texts.

If you need a ride to Columbus why don’t you go with Dad?

—

After my last class Friday, I take the bus home. Five minutes into packing, Dad honks his horn in my building’s parking lot. He wants to get a jump on traffic. We listen to NPR most of the drive. But an hour into the trip, Dad pops a CD-R out of the stereo and asks me to hand him another one from the glove box. It’s in a clear orange case and marked Dr. Horton, A&S.

“Wait.” I turn it over. “We’ve been listening to CDs of NPR this whole time?”

Dad snatches it. “I have my TA tape podcasts for me.”

“What? Dad.”

Once the new program starts, Dad motions for me to be quiet. Someone named Dr. Cody Horton is being interviewed about his new book.

“Dr. Cody?” I snicker. “Does he sell protein bars?”

Dad raises the volume. The interviewer, the same monotone woman we’ve been listening to since Cleveland, introduces Dr. Cody Horton’s new book, Einstein’s Games, which is about the same area of history Dad specializes in. Scientific thought experiments. I’m ready to tune out, but then Dr. Cody starts talking about something I actually understand: Maxwell’s Demon, a nineteenth-century scenario James Clerk Maxwell invented to test the limitations of the second law of thermodynamics.

“I used that in my poetry class,” I say. “We made up ‘impossible poems.’ But you know, Maxwell didn’t call it a demon. It was actually Lord Kelvin who—”

“Gwen.”

The interviewer reads a passage from Dr. Cody’s book involving one of Albert Einstein’s students at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute solving the problem of Maxwell’s Demon in the 1920s. Dr. Cody responds, “And the results of this little thought experiment eventually grew into the foundation for modern information theory.”

“Incredible,” the interviewer says. “And without that we wouldn’t have computers or cell phones or—anything.”

“Exactly,” Dr. Cody says.

Dad smacks the dashboard. “Come on!” he yells. “It was Leo Szilard and he didn’t solve it. His paper later led Claude Shannon to develop information entropy.” The radio shifts to an ad for a Cleveland Orchestra concert that happened two months ago.

Dad turns to me, as if I’m the one he’s been arguing with. “I’d hardly say that’s why we have fucking cell phones.”

“Dad,” I say, “do you want me to drive?”

“This is the problem with these hotshot historians.” He keeps one hand on the wheel while the other flies in wide gestures. “It’s the fucking Einstein economy.”

Here’s how I explained the demon to my poetry class:

“The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. The second law states that entropy always increases. In this case, entropy equals the unavailability of useful energy in a closed system. Low entropy means there’s lots of energy available. High entropy means there’s very little.

“Another way to think of it is that time always moves forward, never backwards. We grow old, never young. Water left in a pot without a flame will always become cold, never hot.

“But if your objective is to create ‘work’ (aka, the motive power that results from an exchange of energy), then you want to keep order in a closed system. You want one area that’s cold, and one that’s hot. You don’t want warmth. You can’t do anything with warmth. Warmth is high entropy. Warmth is chaos.

“And, so, back in 1867, a Scottish poet and physicist by the name of James Clerk Maxwell proposed a thought experiment in which there was a box filled with fast-moving particles and slow-moving ones.”

I drew the box on the dry-erase board with red and blue markers.

“So let’s say in the middle of the box, there’s this invisible being—a demon—who can open and close a door that allows hot particles to flow into one area, while keeping the cold particles out. A system like this could potentially work in perpetuity. Thus maintaining the order of hot and cold. No energy wasted, no entropy gained. No mixing, no warmth. Perpetual motion.

“But it’s only that,” I said, dropping the markers. “A thought experiment.”

Dad and I arrive at the hotel. It’s next to an outdoor luxury mall. Everything is peach: the buildings, the streets, the sidewalks. Since he’s the one with the travel voucher, we split the room. Dad claims the bed closer to the bathroom. I take the one by the window. We have a view of the highway and the P.F. Chang’s.

He drags his entire carry-on bag into the bathroom. A few minutes later, he emerges in a fresh outfit that looks exactly like the one he wore in the car: a blue Oxford tucked into neatly pressed khakis. He’s in his early sixties but still has most of his hair, only now starting to turn white. In old pictures, he looks exactly like Drake, which means he looks exactly like Bill.

I remain in my wrap dress and leggings, since it is one of only two outfits I had time to pack while Dad was laying on the horn at my building. On the trip from the room to the lobby, I try to guess who’s there for the conference and who is a regular guest. Past the front desk, outside a bar and grill called Buckeyes, there’s a slow-moving mass of men dressed exactly like Dad and women in oversized skirts with colorful scarves and tote bags.

We get in line to receive our lanyards. Dad’s is laminated, Dr. Frank Monaghan, Guest, while I am given a paper card, Gwendolyn Monaghan, Visiting Speaker. I have to slide it inside the lanyard myself. Both of us are handed folders stuffed with itineraries. On the table, I notice another laminated card:

Dr. Cody Horton, Keynote Speaker.

“Oh my god,” I say, hanging my lanyard around my neck. “It’s the hotshot historian.”

Dad hisses at me like I’m six years old. “Gwen.”

The woman behind the table glances between us. She’s around Dad’s age. Frizzy brown hair, big round glasses. “Oh,” she says, nodding at our lanyards, “are you two married?”

“Are you serious?” I gasp. “He’s my father.”

Dad relaxes his scowl. He even chuckles. “Honest mistake,” he says, leading me away from the table, into Buckeyes. It’s a standard hotel bar: faux wood, glossy tables, TVs everywhere. I walk about a foot away from Dad, still shaking off the heebie-jeebies. Ten minutes later, we’re sitting at a high-top, both with drinks—beer for him, gimlet for me—when he says, “Gwen, it was an honest mistake. We have the same last name.”

“You’re like thirty years older than me. I bet this never happens with Mom and Drake.”

“It was a woman who said it!”

“It’s still sexist,” I say, glancing at the itinerary. Dr. Cody’s keynote speech is at seven p.m. My talk is in the morning, the nine-thirty slot, the same time Dad’s on a panel with Dr. Cody. Later, at one p.m., Dad is giving his own presentation, “AI Thought Experiments.”

He taps his phone. He’s only halfway through his beer, but I’m ready for another gimlet. Since he’s the one getting reimbursed, I head to the bar for another. It’s so crowded I have to bob between two burly men on stools, both talking to women far younger than them. I shouldn’t make assumptions. Perhaps they’re also father-daughter academics on a road trip. As I try to wave down the busy bartenders, a man two stools down is doing the same thing. He’s around my age, wavy brown hair, thick-rimmed glasses, and a thin, fashionable mustache.

“Hey,” he cries to me. “Let’s pool our resources.” He lifts his hand as if pulling a lever. “Whoever gets them first can order for the other?”

“What are you having?” I ask.

He grins, showing delightfully crooked teeth. “Whatever you are.”

I end up buying our drinks—two gimlets—and soon he’s found his way into my nook. He’s a little taller than me and dressed like Dad, except he’s wearing a band T-shirt beneath his button-up. The Avett Brothers. His lanyard dangles as we clink glasses. He’s Dr. Cody Horton, and I try not to laugh. Dad will be so mad his department bought his nemesis a drink.

Cody also glances at my lanyard. “Where do you teach?” he asks.

With most people, it’s a question I don’t mind. Around academics, my stomach gurgles. “A few schools,” I say, “up in Cleveland.”

He nods along, Ah, OK, you’re an adjunct. I ask where he teaches and he says, “Northwestern.” Smooth, one-word, simple. No explanation needed.

“I heard you on the radio,” I say, my voice rising over the noise. “Talking about your book—the Einstein one?” I pause. “A few months ago?”

“I’ll be talking more about it soon,” he says, flicking his lanyard. Keynote Speaker. “Stick around—I’ll buy you a drink after.”

“Maybe.”

“So, hey,” he says, his eyes drawn back to my lanyard, “are you—”

Our networking is cut short when two bearded men and a very small woman in a very long dress butt into our conversation. “Cody! Dr. Horton!” They laugh and gush like old friends at a reunion. All their lanyards look like Dad’s: doctors, guests. I wander back to Dad, who is still at our high-top, but now talking to a woman around his age with a tote bag overstuffed with books. Her lanyard says: Dr. Heather Gupta, Guest.

“Gwen,” Dad says, “this is my friend Heather. We studied in Germany together.”

“You’re the poet,” Heather says in an English accent, clutching a giant glass of water. “And you’re teaching now?”

“Yeah,” I say, my eyes drifting back to Cody across the room.

“Literature?” Heather asks. “Poetry?”

“Mostly first-year writing. Freshman comp. That kind of thing.”

“Gwen’s adjuncting for now,” Dad says. “While she figures things out.”

Heather has the same Ah, OK look Cody did. She takes big gulps of water and starts to veer away from our high-top. “It was nice meeting you,” she says. “Frank, I’ll see you at the panel tomorrow.”
After she leaves, I turn to Dad. “Why did you say it like that?”

He glances over my shoulder. “Were you talking to Cody Horton?”

“You always make it sound like I have some temp job.”

Dad shakes his Amstel Light, almost empty. The critical mass in the bar has shifted again, slowly funneling into the auditorium. “Was he asking about me?”

I sip my drink, glaring. “Yeah, Dad, that was his opening line.”

Dad leans forward on his elbows, unamused. “Gwen, seriously,” he says, “stay away from him. This is what these guys do.”

“You told me to network. He’s the keynote speaker.”

“A guy like that is not going to network with an adjunct.”

The mass migration quickens. Fast-moving particles, brushing past our table. Soon, Dad and I are the only ones remaining in the bar other than the staff. Once everyone has left, the furniture and decorations look even cheaper. Like props on a movie set, meant to be torn down and discarded. One of the bartenders turns up the volume on the TV, playing a reality show about an Alaskan fishing boat.

“Why are you so ashamed of me?” I ask.

“I’m not ashamed,” Dad says. “I’m just telling you how things are.”

“I’m happy with my life. You’re the one who’s got a problem with it.”

“You’re not happy. You have no benefits, no job security, no institutional support.”

“You always act as if it’s my fault, but almost seventy percent of faculty jobs in this country aren’t tenure-track. Maybe it was easy for you to get your job in 1998, but things are different now.”

“Look,” he says, pointing his beer bottle at me, “I’ve held my tongue, but I—”

“You’ve held your tongue?”

“I thought it was a phase. I thought when you came to your senses, you’d find something real or go back to your PhD. But you’re in the prime of your professional years and you’ve just taken these part-time gigs that pay nothing and go nowhere.”

“My paper got me into this conference too.” I flick my lanyard. “Just because I’m not a guest doesn’t mean I don’t belong here.”

“I’m talking about the future. You’re reaching an expiration date with adjuncting, but you either don’t realize it or you’re being willfully obtuse.”

“I know plenty of adjuncts who’ve been doing this for decades.”

“Because they’re past the point of no return. They’ll never get on the tenure track. Hiring committees won’t take them seriously. You adjunct for too long, you get the stink on you. You can’t wash it off.”

“The stink?”

“It’s a story as old as time, Gwen: Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?”

I scoot out of my chair and stand. “Oh my god,” I say, “you are such an asshole.”

I finish my drink in mid-flight. I leave the glass on the bar and head to the auditorium. It’s about a quarter filled. Most of the visiting speakers probably aren’t arriving until tomorrow. If it weren’t for Dad, I’d be one of them. Waking up early to drive the two and a half hours, only staying for the day, eating protein bars between panels. But I’m here now, and as Cody takes the stage, the guests applaud. I applaud.

After Cody’s lecture, I head to the bar. Dad has left. Once again, Cody is surrounded by a flock of followers. He beckons me to the stool beside him. As I sit, the woman in the oversized glasses passes by and glances at us. Hard. I roll my eyes at her. Cody hands me a gimlet. When we clink glasses, he lifts his brows. “Don’t care much for Ms. McLean?”

I clutch my bobbing cocktail straws. “She thought my dad and I were married when we registered. It’s such a weird thing to assume, you know?”

Cody tosses his cocktail straws on the bar. “I was wondering about that,” he says. “So Frank Monaghan is your father?”

“You actually know who my dad is?”

“I wrote an essay on his Schrödinger book back in undergrad.”

My stomach sours. I haven’t eaten since we arrived. “Good god,” I say, “don’t tell him that. They’ll have to evacuate the hotel when his head explodes.”

Cody chuckles. He removes a vape pen from his pocket and takes a quick hit. He leans close and offers it to me. I accept it, expecting something cherry-scented. It’s got a distinct weed flavor. I exhale, surprised, and pass it back. He leans close and I wish I were here on my own, not sharing a double room with my sixty-two-year-old father six stories up.

But people keep pulling Cody away from me. They clap his shoulder, shake his hand, share their thoughts on his book. Each time they buy him drinks, he orders one for me too. Soon we are drunk and high, and I am giddy off the energy. In grad school, I attended a few literary conferences but haven’t done anything like this since. Most workdays, I travel between campuses, teach my classes, and go home. But here, this feels like community.

We bounce from booth to booth, room to room, party to party. Neither of us wants the night to end. Cody invites me to his room. He’s got beer in his mini fridge and more vape cartridges in his luggage. His room has a queen and a view of Applebee’s. As soon as he shuts the door, he unbuttons his shirt. We have the kind of fast, fumbling sex that makes two people feel like they’ve been waiting ages for it—even though they only met eight hours ago.

After, he hits his vape and offers it to me. It’s late. A little after three a.m.

“Hey,” he says, “want to do something crazy?”

The halls are mostly quiet. We prance on soft carpet. He’s in flip-flops; I’m back in my dress and flats, no tights. When we reach the pool on the lower level, it’s dark behind the glass. Blurry lights warble in the water. It looks cool and clear, like something out of a dream. An imposing sign says it closes after ten.

“Hold on,” Cody says, darting around the corner. I creep behind him, keeping lookout. It feels how it did when I was ten and Bill was thirteen, bored on family vacations. Wandering where we didn’t belong. Cody swipes a keycard off a housekeeping cart and grins at me. He presses on the door, which actually opens.

Soon, we’re shedding our clothes again, down to our underwear, splashing in the pool. It’s bathwater warm and surprisingly salty. It makes swimming easier. We float, weightless. Our skin slick. His hand slips from my thigh to my calf to my ankle. I kick away, giggling. He swims after me. It becomes a game. He catches me in the shallow end. Cornered. I can’t move. From there, the window overlooks a stone garden, chairs on the patio tables surrounded by nothingness. It’s like one of Mom’s paintings.

I slip away again. Skim beneath the surface. A beam of light cuts across the water. I brush my fingers along the floor. It’s rough, concrete. I think of Bill, diving into the water. When he hit the rock, I wonder if it was like a light going out all at once.

I close my eyes and open them. I close them again.

Open. Close.

Suddenly, it’s cold.

My body is yanked from the water, dragged to the steps in the shallow end.

My knee skims the concrete.

It’s Cody, pulling me from the water. On the other side of the pool area, bright lights flash. A security guard walks with fast, heavy feet. “Pool is closed!” he hollers.

This feels like getting in trouble in high school—except we’re in our thirties. But Cody, for some reason, takes it dead seriously. He releases my arm and sprints to the glass doors. On the way, I slip on a slick patch and trip over a lounge chair.

The pain hits several places all at once. My shoulder, arm, both knees, ankle. I hear the swift crack of the door open and close. Through the glass, Cody darts down the hallway, dripping in his boxers.

The security guard rushes over to me, followed by a desk clerk. Everything presses in. My body aches and stings, but it’s more than that. It’s dark, I’m cold, I am half-drunk, half-awake, bleeding on the concrete, surrounded by disapproving grown-ups.

The desk clerk wakes Dad up, and he drives me to an emergency room. It’s around five a.m. when we arrive, which means we have to wait hours to get X-rays. I have a lateral malleolus fracture in my right leg, just above the ankle. It’s slight, but serious enough to warrant a brace. I don’t have insurance, which means Dad handles all the paperwork and I will hear about it until the end of time.

More hours pass. I keep telling him he can go, return to the conference, give his talk. He swipes his phone and says, “I’m not leaving you here.”

I slump on the papery bed. Outside, nurses and firemen brush past. Actual emergencies. I glance at Dad and wonder what it was like when Bill was rushed in. It happened in the middle of the night. I woke when Mom screamed. Dad burst into my room and said, “Gwen, watch your mother.” And, at the time, I stayed oddly calm. The more Mom panicked, the more I wanted to freeze myself in place. Exist in a theoretical box, watching everything outside of space and time.

By the time we leave, it’s midday. I sit in the backseat of the car, my leg elevated on a stack of Dad’s books. I still smell like salt, chlorine, and up-all-night body odor. I wonder if Cody will find my leggings on his hotel floor or if it will be a housekeeper who tosses them in the trash.

My phone is almost dead. It’s a little before noon. “You can still make your talk,” I say.

Dad glances at me in the rearview. “You want to get breakfast?”

We hit a diner off the highway. It’s so hot when we enter, we immediately shed our coats. The server brings water in two coffee mugs. She says there was an accident with the new busboy. She’ll bring real glasses once they have them.

“It’s fine,” Dad says, lifting a mug. “But can we get some real coffee too?”

The sun burns bright through the window, casting the booth in a warm peach glow. Winter sunlight. My phone buzzes. At first, I think it might be Cody checking in—but I never even gave him my number. It’s a student email, asking about an extension on a paper. His words cascade with struggles: work problems, family problems, computer problems. I want to help, put him at ease, tell him a late paper will not be the end of the world—but I also want to say, We all have problems, kid. Figure it out. I flip the phone over. Dad and I drink water from our coffee mugs. Across the table, I notice his sweater is turned inside out, the dark green seams running along his shoulders, around his collar. When the waitress returns with actual coffee, we put our orders in. Eggs, bacon, hash browns, French toast.

The place is busy, but the kitchen sends the food out fast. I imagine a giant grill covered in sunny-side up eggs, battered Texas toast, and crispy potatoes. Line cooks with spatulas, servers shouting tickets, bussers tiptoeing past broken glass.

Dad sprinkles salt and pepper on his eggs. “I hope you’re not mad,” he says, “but I read your paper last night.” He moves the shakers away from the plate, sliding them across the table as if playing with action figures. “Your teaching sounds damn innovative.”

I’m so surprised I don’t respond. My brain is still muddled. I sip coffee. Dad continues, “Anyway, I’m sorry for going through your notes. You should submit it to other conferences.”

“I don’t know if I’m getting invited to any conferences after this, Dad.”

He releases the shakers and grabs his fork. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “This shit, it means everything—but it doesn’t actually mean anything. You are not who people will be talking about.”

“I don’t know if that’s reassuring or depressing.”

Dad cuts into his eggs. He takes a bite and chuckles, “It’s both.”

Outside the window, the parking lot glitters with sunny windshields. Gritty gray snow mounds rise along the side of the road. I reach across the table and grab the hot sauce. I shake it on my eggs. We eat while our food is still hot.

The door chimes whenever someone comes or goes. I remember family vacations when all five of us would squeeze into a booth. Mom and Dad on one side, my brothers and I on the other. While we waited for our food, Dad would walk us through thought experiments. He’d raise the salt and pepper shakers and say, “Let’s say we put Bill on a spaceship.”

Bill always took offense. “Why do you always send me to outer space?”

Dad always snickered, “Cause you’re the smart-ass.” He’d hold the salt high in the air while skating the pepper across the table. “As the years pass for Drake down here, they’ll pass differently for Bill up there.” He’d bow the salt in a slow arc until, eventually, it came back to the table, meeting up with the pepper. “By the time he returns, Drake will be about seventy-five years old, Gwen seventy-two. But Bill,” he’d say, pushing the salt and pepper shakers together, “you’ll still be ten. Exactly how you are now.”

Exactly how you are now.

The server refills our water and coffee. She never brings new glasses, and we don’t ask for them. Around us, the booths are packed. The kitchen stays busy. The air is hot, but each time a new customer enters, or one leaves, cold air blows through the diner, keeping everything moving.