LITMIR.BIZ

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your papa soldered and tested his circuits, and the table where he sketched out his designs and typed on his typewriter. Thumbtacked to the wall above the tool bins was a crude sketch by your papa of a man laid out on an operating table, with surgeons cleaning up in the background, a cut-away view of his belly revealing a wrench left inside it. The caption in your father’s handwriting said:

      NO OPERATION IS COMPLETE

      UNTIL ALL THE TOOLS AND PARTS

      HAVE BEEN PUT AWAY

      Then there was the back room, where your father kept the band saw and a blue machine on splayed legs for cutting tubes and shafts that galumphed like a lame camel. Sheets and chunks of every sort of metal were kept there in wooden bins, with other bins holding spare and used parts.

      Under banks of long fluorescent bulbs buzzing and wavering in their death throes you would walk to where your father stood working, wearing his pilled moth-eaten cardigan and stained khaki trousers (winter) or shorts (summer). Past rows of tiny drawers brimming with screws, bolts, nuts, washers, tubes, lenses, photocells, toggle switches, relays (“tick-tick things,” you called them), solenoids, potentiometers, rheostats, transformers, resistors, capacitors (“capacitators”), and rectifiers, you would make your way, carefully avoiding the holes in the floor. On the table next to your father’s typewriter a portable radio played a mixture of classical music and static.

      The Building had its own special smell, a blend of solder smoke, scorched metal, mildew, electrical shorts, farts, and orange peels. Your father liked to eat oranges when he worked. He kept a straw basket of them by his typewriter. He’d toss the peels into a gray metal wastepaper basket, along with gobs of pulp that he would spit into his palm. A perfume of oranges rose from the wastebasket.

      You’d watch him typing with two fingers on his Royal typewriter, or soldering a circuit, or turning a part on the lathe. The lathe was your favorite. You loved watching him manipulate its plethora of bright chrome dials with one hand, like an engineer manning the controls of a locomotive, while smoothing the fingers of his other hand around the spinning chuck, its knuckles black with grime. From the spinning chuck bright turnings of aluminum, copper, and brass spiraled to the rotted floor. Afterward you’d sweep the turnings up with the dustpan, pocketing the longest and brightest specimens for a collection you kept in a wooden box.

      Among boxy instruments on his workbench was one with a round screen called an oscilloscope. As it shed its green light over his thin gray hair, his sloping forehead, his wrinkled brow, his aquiline nose, your father would gaze at the glowing screen and you would gaze at him, wondering what he made of it, amazed that your father (or anyone) could extract meaning from a dancing thread of light.

      The Building was your father’s sanctuary, the place where he sought refuge among his ideas and instruments. It was your refuge, too, a shrine, the place where you went to worship your papa and experience the awe and mystery of his works. Under its buzzing and flickering fluorescent lights, between the holes in its rotting floor, in a pall of solder smoke and radio static, the universe was conceived, engineered, tested, and approved.

      IN THE BUILDING’S back room you had your own workbench, with your own (broken) oscilloscope, your own soldering gun, your own plastic drawers of assorted parts. There you gave birth to your own invention, an electric motor you built from scratch, almost. You fit brushes and stators to an old rotor that you found, turned the aluminum casing for it on the lathe, fixed a bearing to the shaft, mounted the result on a bracket, and attached a toggle switch to it. You soldered the two wires, one red and one blue, from the coil to the toggle switch, then added (for the heck of it) two diodes, a small transformer, and a yellow capacitor chosen for its looks alone. You attached an electrical cord to the transformer and plugged the result into a wall outlet.

      Before it caught on fire the capacitor blushed and gave off a bluish gray puff of pungent smoke, garnishing failure with splendor. Still you were damned if your motor didn’t look as if it should have worked, if it didn’t display all the superficial properties of a perfectly good motor. In fact what you had invented was a sculpture of a motor, a postmodern motor. An artist’s motor.

      YOUR VISITS TO the Building ended usually at dusk, when your mother would telephone from the house to say dinner was ready. Before leaving, you’d empty all the wastebaskets and turn off the lights and the furnace.

      With the six o’clock siren howling in the distance, you and your father walked up the hill to the modest Cape Cod with a brick-accented front and dormer windows from which the striped awnings had long been removed. Summer heat, crickets and peepers. Or December dusk, the air crackling cold, the sun about to sink behind a hill.

      Halfway up you and your father stop for a “pissing contest,” both of you standing side by side, unzipping at the driveway’s edge, aiming father-and-son streams into the Queen Anne’s Lace, poke-berries, goldenrod, and milkweed. Your papa’s thick, ruddy, uncircumcised dick resembled the Polish sausages that your mother boiled with potatoes and cabbage. Your own dick scarcely rated notice.

      While pissing, your father would recite a favorite limerick:

       There once was a man from Madras

       Whose balls were made of brass

       In frosty weather they clanged together

       And sparks flew out of his ass

      Your papa’s urine never failed to outperform yours in every category: thickness, altitude, distance, endurance, its glittering golden arch reminding you, as it rose and fell into the weeds, of the brass turnings that spun from his lathe. Watching it twist and turn in the twilight, you’d say to yourself: When I can pee that far, I’ll be a man.

      BY THE TIME you got to the Building that day it was already dusk. The lights still burned inside. You knocked on the inner door. To your father’s Come in, Peter my boy, you let yourself in, remembering to shut the door behind you. Your father sat at his typewriter, typing. Well, well, so good to see you, Peter boy, he said, and went on typing with two fingers, smiling. Maybe he asked you about your first day at school. You may even have said something about visiting the new teacher in his cottage, though it’s unlikely. However affectionate and welcoming, your father never pretended to be that interested in you. He listened to you the way he listened to his radio, appreciating the background noise even though he didn’t give a fig what music was playing.

      Anyway, you’d forget what you talked or didn’t talk about.

      But you wouldn’t forget how, when you were small, on hot summer days your papa would take you and George to a muddy swimming hole under a railroad trestle near the edge of town, how once there he would enter the water as he always did, ever so slowly, inch by gruesome inch, making wincing sounds as if he were stepping into a vat of boiling oil. Meanwhile the fathers of other kids your age ran and jumped into the water.

      How you had longed for your papa to jump like the others. Jump, Papa, Jump! you would plead. But he wouldn’t. I can’t, he’d say. I’m too old.

      Those three words – I’m too old – how they tolled in you like a tarnished bell. Too old Too old Too old… At moments like that your disappointment knew no bounds. And it was true. Your papa was old, born in 1912, the same year the Titanic sank.

      But it wasn’t old age that kept your father from jumping into bodies of water anymore than it prevented him from throwing footballs or playing catch, things your father would no sooner have done than he would have swum the Bosporus or climbed Mount Everest. It wasn’t age that made your papa old. It was his unwillingness to do anything that failed to engage him, that didn’t pertain to his pursuits and interests. It was egocentricity, not age, that made your father so old.

      So you concluded that day after visiting the new teacher for the first time.

      As you stood there watching your father type, seeing him smile in concentration, it occurred to you that something else had changed for you that day. You realized, not for the first time but with a novel sense of bitter disappointment, that your papa, the human god who’d invented the world for you, was a remote, absentminded

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