freefallin

4/1/2006

argonne's location is considerably cooler than i had thought. the laboratory is not a western suburb but an impossibly hip skyscraper downtown. the building is tall and black, set with glass exterior elevators and embellished with a neon blue, green, red and white argonne logo near its summit.
on july 4, 2006, i was pulling a late night in the lab. i had to get to my grandma Kruse's fireworks-watching party, but i was on the verge of an important breakthrough in my research. finally i set up a test that would run all night, started it, and got permission to leave from the grad student i worked with (ivan from the squid and the whale).
i took the 6 to sandusky, ohio, just north of 47th and the LSD. my grandma's house was filled with almost 200 people--it was almost definitely the biggest party she'd ever thrown. a dozen or so second/third/fourth cousins under the age of 6 are running underfoot; adults are drinking cocktails, mistletoe is hanging and Grandma's wearing a santa hat. i gave her a hug and walked towards a less-crowded hall to find and greet my other grandmother, Grandmommy Campbell.
Annie stopped me by the cheese table to show me that my moon was looking sort of deflated and Nick's moon had lost almost all its beans. i put them in my backpack to keep them safe and went to see Grandmommy.
she was sitting in front of a dresser in one of the guest bedrooms, watching and listening to a very old german Christmas music box where dozens of tiny mechanical elves, polar bears and penguins pulled sleds and hammered at toys. she turned to me.
"can you find me the rest of christmas?" she asked.
"sure," i said, "where?"
"in the drawer," she said.
i looked in the dresser drawers and there were only socks and wallets.
"no, no, no," she said, frustrated. i didn't know where else to look.
"here," said uncle dick, turning a knob on the ornate headboard of the bed i was sitting on. a secret drawer in the woodwork opened to reveal a tiny carved wooden sleigh and reindeer. he walked over to the wall, felt around for a while, and eventually found a drawer with a christmas sweater in it. he handed the sweater and the sleigh to grandmommy.
"thank you," she said.
"wow," i said to uncle dick.
he shrugged.
"they're all the same if you know where to look," he said.
i head back to the living room to get something to drink. it's darker now and i notice a terrible cloud over lake michigan.
"oh fuck," i said. "it's going to storm."
"don't say that word," said my dad, pouring himself a glass of coke zero from a two-liter bottle. "and don't worry about the storm. we'll just navigate closer to the other boats."
i was confused, but i followed him outside to find that Grandma Kruse's house was indeed a boat. from outside it didn't look like a house at all. dad sailed us right up next to some other boats. i still took issue with his logic (closeness of boats --> safeness of boats), but trusted him enough to go back inside.
while the storm raged i sat in a drawing room, away from all the third cousins, and looked at the knicknacks on a dark wooden shelf. one of them was a clear plastic box. it had been mailed from me to a high school friend for whom i had no romantic feelings, but whose name i'd replaced on the address label with "hottie mchotterson". i wondered how it got here.
soon it was light again, and i walked to the back porch, which now opened onto a perfectly reasonable backyard and sandusky bay/lake michigan. a few party guests were swimming. ivan and an adult male cousin stood in the fading sunlight with beers.
"did you know that tom petty wrote 'freefallin'' in that exact spot?" ivan asked the cousin, motioning at the bay with his half-empty beer can.
"no way."
"it's true."
i walked to the spot they'd indicated, stood straight up with my back to the bay, and let myself fall in with my clothes on.
i sank straight to the bottom. it was freezing cold, i couldn't push off, and i began to become afraid that i would drown. my cell phone floated out of my pocket and farther into the lake. in an act of desperation, i channeled "freefallin'" in my mind.
suddenly i found that i could breathe underwater, but only through my nose. i swam to my cell phone, which was ringing, and took the call.