The Second Law of Thermodynamics
Simon must navigate a loved one’s sudden death
On the morning of my father’s suicide, I was exploring a new hiking trail with this boy I’d met in a physics class. I didn’t actually take physics — I’d just followed him in after noticing the peculiar colour of his eyes, an acidic blue which reminded me of Windex. He was cute, and I was generally won over by cute boys, so I’d been fabricating a passing knowledge of the subject.
It was raining, but the foliage above us was so thick that it shielded us from the water. It came down in thick sheets whenever the leaves bent under its weight. The world was green and lush as a fever, punctuated by blue-green curls of dripping goatsbeard.
These moments, before I knew, feel as though they were borrowed from someone else’s dream. I have memories which cannot possibly be real — the way he’d whistled a song which hadn’t been released until a month later; the tick of his watch, which would have been too quiet to hear.
My phone rang. I slipped my hand out of his to pick it up.
My grandmother’s voice came through the speaker, thick and cracking with tears.
“Simon,” she said. “Your father was found dead this morning.”
I think the news should have made a bigger impression on me than it did. People on television usually fell down when something horrible happens, so I considered doing that. I didn’t, though. I just stared at the boy, who looked back at me and wiggled his eyebrows.
“That’s strange,” I told my grandmother. “He wasn’t yesterday.”
“Well,” she said, her voice breaking. “He is now.”
“Very strange,” I said. “Well. Thank you for letting me know.” I hung up and put my phone away. The boy smiled at me. “Is something wrong? You’re ... shaking.”
I pushed my boot into the dirt and leaves which lined our narrow path. It was so dark beneath them. Pregnant with bacteria and insects and all the funny little things which turned dead animals into more dirt and more leaves. “Oh, no,” I told him, then laughed to prove it. “Everything is alright. Except. Actually. I have to be somewhere, it turns out. Will you excuse me?”
He tipped his head. “Of course. You drove me here, though.”
“Right.” I kicked the earth again. I worried that I might vomit, then sort of hoped I would, because that would have been an appropriate reaction. “Let me drive you home, first, and then I’ll ... be where I need to be.”
I didn’t drive him home. I brought him to my apartment and kissed him.
Does that seem callous? I think it does.
This boy, he had hands as pale as the moon and a smile that would swallow you up whole if you let it. I didn’t love him. I don’t think I was capable of loving anyone. Feeling clung to me like burrs on your clothing — they followed you along a little ways, then were knocked off to seed elsewhere. My city was littered with people I’d wanted to love but hadn’t.
What I felt for my father wasn’t particularly different, I suppose. There was a glassy absence in me where most people care for each other. When I was a child, I used to look up templates for father’s day cards, trying to mimic a sentimentality that I didn’t own.
My sister came to my home, because this was the city in which we’d have his funeral. In the months since I’d seen her, she’d dyed her hair a hazy purple. She stepped through the doorway and her eyes flittered across my apartment, her mouth twisting downwards the more she looked.
It’s a nice place, I think. My father had money, much of which he’d given to us. (And more of which we’d be receiving, depending on how skilled our respective mothers’ lawyers were.) It was small by choice rather than by necessity, with dark wooden floors and walls in classical off-whites. Various parts of it folded up or slid into other parts in order to maximize space. But I’d drawn the blinds shut and every surface was decorated with shucked-off clothes and crumpled paper and empty cans and takeout containers.
I took her bags from her and showed her to my bedroom, where she would sleep. “There’s no bed, Simon,” she told me. “No, see, it unfolds from the wall.” I unfolded it for her. She sighed deeply, then sat down on the bed and pinched the bridge of her nose.
“God. What a nightmare. I can’t believe he actually did it.”
“I don’t know. It seems pretty much in character.” It absolutely did not. The idea of my father having any kind of human emotion, let alone one strong enough to make him want to die, was impossibly painful to me. I’d spent a lot of time convincing myself that he was less a person than a natural phenomenon which could be weathered in much the same way as a drought.
She picked at some lint on my sheets. “He didn’t even leave a note. You would have thought he’d want to get a final word in.”
“Oh. He did, actually. I nabbed it before Grandma saw it.”
She looked up. “Good thinking. Did you read it?” “No.” “Do you want to?” “No. I don’t think so.” She laughed, a sharp and aborted noise. “Go get it.”
I wandered back into the living room and fished it out from where I’d hidden it in a pile of junk mail. I don’t know who I was hiding it from.
When I went back, she was standing in the middle of my room, arms crossed, legs shoulder-width, like she was about to begin a fight. My metal wastebasket was in front of her. She held out her hand and I put the note into it. It was a heavy thing, all folded up in a fat envelope. Pages and pages, still sealed.
She pulled a lighter out of her pocket, then flicked it on and touched the flame to the edge of the envelope. She had to do it twice, before it caught. And then there it was, red and orange licking up the sides of the paper, black smoke curling where it touched the glue.
She dropped it into the wastebasket. It fell like a weapon, the only bright thing in my dark little home.
I stepped close to feel the heat. The envelope curled away first, and then the note itself was naked in front of us, but the light from the flames was too bright to see any of the words. Something shivered in me.
Victory, I thought. Thank God. The boy texted me before the funeral. u
want to come over, and then a winking face. My sister was looking over my shoulder as she did my tie for me.
“Christ,” she said. “How tactless. Seriously, Simon, you need to learn how to pick them a little better.”
I fiddled with my cufflinks. I had a string of disasters behind me, but I didn’t like her talking about them like that. I am sentimental about the boys I have dated, even the bad ones, even the one who flung me up against the frame of our bedroom door and twisted my wrist so hard it was red for weeks. I press them in the pages of my memories the way that other people press flowers. Wanting something from them that I don’t understand. A certain kind of tenderness that I am not capable of, a curl of meaning. A softness that has nothing to do with the boys themselves.
“He doesn’t know,” I told her. She shook her head, then squeezed my shoulder.
The casket was open. My father didn’t look like he was sleeping. Not even a little bit. I ran my fingers along the wood. We’d picked it out together, a dark mahogany, the most expensive one they had. The man at the funeral parlour had been so happy to sell it to us you could see it in the way his eyes glittered, even as he nodded sympathetically, whispered all the right things. Everyone has to make a living somehow.
His eyes shut. His face like wax. I wanted to feel something. I wanted to be moved. I wanted to know why people wrote father’s day cards. I wanted, I wanted, I wanted.
My sister put her hand on my shoulder. She pulled me away. I guess I’d been standing there too long.
Someone once told me that funeral homes pump the scent of roses all over their grounds to contribute to the ambiance, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t true. It sounds like too much effort. It did smell like roses, though, so I guess anything is possible.
There was a strange lull after the service where neither of us knew what we were supposed to be doing. We looked at the funeral home together, as if something about it was liable to change. Then my sister nudged my shoulder and we drifted towards the car.
“I’ll drop you off,” I told her, as we climbed inside.
“What?” She turned to me as if I’d shot someone.
“Before I go,” I said. “I’ll drop you off at my place.”
“You’re not going to go see him,” she said, flatly, but I was, and I needed to. I was desperate to shake the sense of death away from my skin. I looked at her, begging for silent communication.
We used to talk without speaking when we were kids, before she walked out at17 and left me all alone with him. (I’ve never resented her for that. I’ve always been proud.) I wanted her to understand that I wasn’t whatever it was she thought I was. Monstrous. A reflection of him, his cold eyes, his hard hands, the whip of his voice always arcing towards us.
She ran a hand through her purple hair, and through some miracle I saw her face soften. “Alright,” she said. “Simon, you do what you need to do.”
“Right,” I said. I tapped my fingers against the wheel. “Right. Yes. I will.”
His eyes were chemical blue and his smile was gentle as a secret. Untouched, like I’d plucked him directly from that forest. I stepped into his apartment and kissed him before he closed the door.
“Oh,” he said. “Wow. Hi.” He ruffled his fingers through my hair. I’d never seen his apartment before. It was little and dark, and it still smelled like the last thing he’d cooked — something with burnt sugar and too much soy sauce. It was painted green, and he’d tacked up posters of mostly uninteresting bands, all battered from poor handling. I found all of this very charming.
“Are we going out?” he asked, and I was confused until he gestured towards my suit.
“Oh. Yes. They wouldn’t take reservations, though, so we’ll have to go and hope for the best.” I’d think of a restaurant before we made it to the car.
“Cool.” He leaned down to kiss me just above my ear. “Hold on. Let me find something decent to wear. The cups are just above the sink, if you want water or anything.”
He walked out of the room into a little doorway off the side.
I did want a glass of water. I went into the kitchen. I opened up the cupboard. Then I took a cup and smashed it into the ground, as hard as I could.
The glass struck me as it shattered and formed a perfect glittering circle in which I stood, staring down at the thick piece which had been the base of the cup and which had not been hurt at all.
The boy came running back into the room, his pretty eyes wide.
Here is something I learned from the physics textbook I purchased for $157 to impress someone I’d known for an hour and a half.
Time is only another location, no different from East or West or Europe or a particular longitude. All of it exists all at once. We can only travel along it, forwards, at a rate of one second per second, but all of it exists continually regardless. To pretend otherwise is no different than to believe the child’s dream which says that the whole world ceases to exist when I cover my eyes. And so my father is always swallowing everything from the bottles in his medicine cabinet and he is always snarling in my face how ugly and stupid I am and I am always standing at the top of our stairs watching my sister’s shoulders pass through the doorway for the last time and I am always watching the fire curl along the edges of that envelope.
And if I am frozen in these moments and utterly unable to move past them or feel anything other than the grim absence I required to survive them, then I am no different from anyone else, no different from the most fundamental and irrevocable law of the universe. I am broken, but I am broken in a way that the universe condones.
I felt his hands on my shoulders and I flinched but he was only holding me gently and saying, Simon, Simon, what’s wrong. What happened? His voice was so kind and it was unfortunate that we were never going to see each other again. I’d broken one of his possessions and if he forgave me for that I’d hate him. I didn’t want kindness. I wanted to be thrown against bedroom door frames and told that I was ugly and stupid. Or else why did I teach myself to be so heartless? What would have been the point? There was blood on my hands from the glass.
“My father died,” I told him. “He hung himself and I buried him today.” He deserved an explanation. It wasn’t a very good one, but grief is bewildering and sympathetic and people will allow it to be an answer.
“Jesus,” he said. “Simon, why didn’t you tell me?”
His eyes. You could climb into them and live there, in all that blue. I wanted very suddenly to have lived his life instead of my own. “What would you feel?” I asked him. “If your father had died?” I watched his mouth open and close. “Simon,” he told me. “I’d feel awful. I think I’d feel as if the world were ending.”
“As if the world were ending,” I repeated. I shut my eyes. I saw all the things that had happened and would never stop happening and I tried it on for size as his arms curled around me and he pulled me to his chest with a gentleness I wanted him to ruin. The blood in my fist was cold. It worked as well as anything, I suppose.
Courtney Kusano-Hamel, the first place winner in the Toronto Star’s Short Story Contest, is a 24-year-old English graduate who studied the relationship between thermodynamics, entropy and Victorian literature. Their work has previously appeared in Polychrome Ink, CICADA, Doll Hospital and a 10th-grade textbook.