The Science Fair

The Science Fair

It is the annual science fair, and I am a judge. I’ve taught high school Physics for twenty years now. I get called to do science fairs pretty often. Comes with the territory. This particular fair is is in a town a few over from mine. Five high schools are here, and for two hours I need to feign interest in pH graphs, conductivity, fruit flies, and dissections done by students I don’t know.

I am 45 years old.

A periodic comet is a remnant of the creation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago, I learn from a mousy boy’s poster. It is massive enough to be buffeted by everything gravitationally as it makes its chaotic orbit, its outsides bombarded by the solar wind. Not bad. Thanks, I say, and move along. The boy eyes my white judge’s ribbon nervously.

Just after the kid who flipped nickels one hundred thousand times, and recorded each one (good lord), is a poster about the melting properties of various winter road treatments. I don’t like winter driving at all. A barbaric age we live in. The poster is unattended. On the right wing of the trifold is a photo of a mangled car at the bottom of a snowy ditch. I reach out to touch it and remember a friend I loved deeply, dead just like that on an icy road. Years have passed and the wound is still fresh. I close my eyes to try to pull her image from my memory.

When I open my eyes, I see the girl who has come back to her poster. She has a paper cup filled with water. Water is melted ice. She smiles.

Her eyes.

So familiar somehow. But she is no student of mine.

And the crooked smile.

Nice poster, I say. Tell me about it.

Her project is more memoir than anything scientific. She tells me about her family—two younger sisters, her mother—how they slid into the wrong lane on an icy road, how none of them survived.

She tells me that they had been searching for a house—the first they’d buy. Her mother wanted a log home on a river so she could canoe. The girl argued that it would be too far to travel to school and she would have no social life that far away from other people.

Secretly, she thought that her mom was too picky, that they should just buy something and it would feel like home. She tilts her head to laugh as if she is pouring a small cup of happiness from a pitcher.

Her father hadn’t come back from Germany after the divorce, even after the accident. That's where he's from, the girl told me. She lived with cousins on her mother’s side now. He’s from Germany, she told me again and finished the water.

Our children—I have none—our children—this child—are chunks of dirty ice that hurtle out of the Oort Cloud, propelled by god knows what at 40 km/sec. They all start off intact and massive and seek the warm sun that, like all desires, blinds and burns us.

Our past is the tail of a comet, chunks of our young selves careening off gloriously into color and light, trailing behind our diminishing bodies.

She tells me things about her family—secrets. I feel compelled to reciprocate. A few years back, I met a woman on a beach in Maine, I want to tell her. We both stopped and stared at each other. We shared our names and tried to figure out how we knew each other. We tried everything, interests, geography, common friends, nor were our names familiar to each other in any way. She grew up in New Hampshire, me in New York City. She went to college in Maine, I in North Carolina. And so on. There was no overlap. And yet were were certain. We smiled at the strangeness and eventually parted.

This mystical loneliness, broken parts of us melting off into the void, pieces of us shattering, our bodies diminished second by second by the light and heat and mass that calls to us across the void of loneliness.

Her mother—dead for a year—wanted a log home on a river. Her daughter, alone now, studies road salt. I teach Physics. An hour ago, I knew a lot of things. I was a judge at this science fair, for example.

Now, right this second, I know less than nothing.