The Theory of Light and Matter

by Porter, Andrew

• ISBN13: 9780307475176
• ISBN10: 0307475174
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-01-05
• Publisher: Vintage

Summary

These ten stories take us across the country-from rural Pennsylvania to Southern California to suburban Connecticut-and deep into characters struggling to find meaning in their day-to-day lives.The Theory of Light and Matteris a stunningly astute vision of contemporary American suburbia, full of tension, heartbreak, and emotional complexity-the work of an important new voice. Long Listed for the Frank Ors"Connor International Short Story Award ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year, Short Fiction One of the Best Books of the Year Kansas City Star bull; San Antonio Express-News

Author Biography

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Andrew Porter has received a Pushcart Prize, a James Michener/Copernicus Fellowship, and the W. K. Rose Fellowship in the Creative Arts. His award-winning fiction has appeared in One Story, Epoch, The Threepenny Review, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. He teaches at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

Excerpts

Hole

THE HOLE WAS AT THE END of Tal Walker's driveway. It's paved over now. But twelve summers ago Tal climbed into it and never came up again.

Weeks afterward, my mother would hug me for no reason, pulling me tight against her each time I left the house and later, at night, before I went to bed, she'd run her fingers through the bristles of my crew cut and lean close to me, whispering my name.

Tal was ten when this happened, and I was eleven. The backs of our yards touched through a row of forsythia bushes, and we had been neighbors and best friends since my parents had moved to Virginia three years before. We rode the bus together, sat next to each other in school, even slept at each other's houses, except in the summer when we slept out in the plywood fort we'd built under the Chinese elm in Tal's backyard.

Tal liked having the hole on his property. It was something no one else in the neighborhood had and he liked to talk about it when we camped out in the fort. The opening was a manhole that Tal's dad had illegally pried open, and it led to an abandoned sewer underneath their driveway. Rather than collecting their grass clippings and weeds in plastic bags as everyone else on the street did, the Walkers would lift the steel lid and dump theirs into the hole. It seemed like a secret, something illicit. We never actually knew what was in there. It was just a large empty space, so murky you could not see the bottom. Sometimes Tal would try to convince me that a family of lizard creatures lived there, just like the ones he swore he'd seen late at night by the swamp--six-foot-tall lizard people that could live on just about anything, twigs or grass, and had special vision that enabled them to see in the dark.

That was twelve years ago. My family no longer lives in Virginia and Tal is no longer alive. But this is what I tell my girlfriend when I wake at night and imagine Tal talking to me again:

It is mid-July, twelve summers ago, and Tal is yelling to me over the roar of the lawn mower less than an hour before his death. His mouth is moving but I can't hear him. Tal is ten years old and should not be mowing the lawn, but there he is. His parents are away for the day on a fishing trip at Eagle Lake, and Kyle, his older brother, has offered him fifty cents to finish the backyard for him. Tal and I are at the age when responsibility is an attractive thing, and Kyle has been nice enough on a few occasions to let us try out the mower, the same way my father has let us sit on his lap and drive his truck.

It's drought season in Virginia. No rain in two weeks and the temperature is in triple digits, predicted to top out at 105 by evening. The late afternoon air is gauzy, so thick you can feel yourself moving through it and when I squint, I can actually see the heat rising in ripples above the macadam driveway.

Tal is hurrying to finish, struggling through the shaggy grass, taking the old rusted mower in long sweeping ovals around the yard. The back of his T-shirt is soaked with sweat, and from time to time a cloud of dust billows behind him as he runs over an anthill or mud wasps' nest. It is the last hour of his life, but he doesn't know that. He is smiling. The mower chokes and spits and sometimes stalls and Tal kicks at it with his bare feet. In the shade of the Walkers' back porch, I am listening to the Top 40 countdown on the radio, already wearing my bathing suit, waiting for Tal to empty the final bag of clippings into the hole so we can go swimming at the Bradshaws' pool.

The Bradshaws are the last of the rich families in our neighborhood. Their children have all grown up and moved away, and this summer they are letting Tal and me use their pool two or three times a week. They don't mind that we curse and make a lot of noise or that we come over in just our underwear sometimes. They stay in their large, air-conditioned house, glancing out the windows from time

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Excerpted from The Theory of Light and Matter by Andrew Porter
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