Chapter 5 - Venerable Chaos
Victor's skateboard had been put away and they were on their sixth cup of coffee.
"Max, the life of an inventor is never easy." He shook his head. "No, it's never easy. And, of course, it goes without saying that it can sometimes be frustrating. The specter of failure looms over all of us, breathing down our necks with its stale breath of futility and waste. Poverty and, indeed, madness are not unknown. Poor eyesight and bad nerves plague us. Credibility is hard to come by and respect is almost non-existent. We are looked upon as eccentric, if not downright dimwitted. Our way is never clear. Our voices seldom heard. Woe, I tell you is not just an exclamation, it is an injunction."
Victor hung his shaggy head and Max wondered what he had let himself in for. As a child, Max had thought that this business of inventing, despite its dangers, was exciting in a way that seemed filled with hope. And it had been prosperous. Hadn't his father and his grandfather both made money? And if both of them had been a little eccentric, at least neither of them had worn glasses. He was about to ask Victor about this when Victor looked up and stared at Max, his eyes not only undamaged but quite powerful.
He smiled, which banished all the gloom and doom and said, "For some reason, this shop and the work of your father and grandfather has always been blessed with success. We have had our share of disappointments but we have also had more than our fair share of discoveries.
"Max, I can't pretend to understand it. Sure, we worked hard, we studied, we stayed up late, we got up early, we ate our vegetables, but that can't account for it. Maybe it was the coffee."
Victor started laughing and choking. The coffee in question was boiling on the burner. It seemed to Max that it had been boiling there for years. In fact, he wouldn't have recognized it as coffee except for the sugar and cream that Victor had offered with it, which toned it down a little.
Finally, Victor recovered and said, "Would you like to see your room?"
"No thanks." Max had other things on his mind. He didn't know what to say, so he said, "Victor, what was my father working on when he died? He told me his papers might help me someday."
Victor turned serious. "Max, I can't tell you. What I mean is I don't really know. As I look back on it, I see that he had become secretive and a little weird. He was always shaking his head as if he couldn't believe the data. And I would find him here, with a cup of coffee, looking out the window with a worried look on his face. We had always worked together but that last six months he wouldn't show me anything and when I asked if I could help, he would look at me and say, 'Not yet, it's not quite clear'.
"Well, that was ridiculous. Nothing is ever clear until it presents itself, until the last piece of the puzzle falls into place and that had never stopped us from working together before. I think he was scared. Both for himself and for me. Scared of what he was finding out. I think he was trying to protect me."
Max, against his better judgment, poured himself another cup of coffee and asked, "But what was it? What do his papers say?"
"I never looked at the papers. The night he died, he collapsed at that table over there. I heard the noise and ran to his side. As I held him, his last words were, 'I think I've got it' but he didn't look happy. He was dying, of course, why should he be happy, but the look on his face was frightening. As if he had seen something, as if whatever it was that he thought he had gotten had turned out to be overwhelming, and dangerous. Maybe it was just perplexing, but it was obviously more than nail polish or curlers or something." Victor bent his head and, thinking of the papers, said, "I guess I never had the nerve to look."
They both fell silent while the room hummed and the coffee boiled on.
His father's death had scared him somehow, too, even at a distance, although his reaction had always been just a feeling, an intuition with no reason or information to support it. Now, what Victor was telling him started him thinking and he began to see a direction for the work he was about to begin.
Victor's words were spooking him a little but he wanted to know what it was his father had found out. He was just as curious and determined as his father had been and he decided, in the space of a breath, that he would pursue the work of his father no matter what it turned up. He needed to know whether it was this discovery and its implications or the sixty years of terrible coffee, which had killed him.
He saw that Victor was saddened by this talk and was looking older than he had before, if that was possible, so he cleared his throat in preface to changing the subject and bowing toward Victor, said, "O, venerable creator of chaos, show me what you've been up to."
Victor snorted. "I couldn't possibly show it to you in one night." He gestured to the vast room, half of it engulfed in shadow, but all of it filled with the odds and ends of projects, some finished and some left incomplete in a moment of inspiration or despair. Max looked around at it. The huge room hummed with a latent energy that Max could never quite pinpoint but which kept things exciting and hopeful. Through some serendipity of design, this vast workspace stayed warm in the winter and cool throughout the summer. For all its endless square footage and high ceilings and earnest sense of purpose, it was a homey, relaxed, and agreeable place.
Victor said, "Of course, this is mostly all play." He looked seriously at Max. "That's the nature of our work. The basis of everything. Let me show you a few things."
They wandered down one of the long aisles and stopped first at a bench covered with nails. They were lined up in neat, orderly rows and the first four and a half rows were flush with the table. The rest were standing at attention, only the tips of them embedded in the table's surface. There was a hammer nearby.
"Therapy," Victor explained.
Next, they paused before a table covered with what looked like brightly colored spaghetti. This turned out to be a mess of wires and they were connected in a way that baffled Max. Several pieces of equipment stood to one side, their screens flickering, measuring, recording. Max looked to Victor for an explanation.
Victor shook his head and said, "I can't remember what this is. Maybe it will come back to me."
In a corner, they came upon a worktable with several small gadgets on it that resembled portable radios. There were many dials on the surface of these boxes and set into each one was a clock face with only one hand. The hands appeared to be all pointing the same way.
"Synchronized," said Victor. "This was C.J.'s attempt at harmonic convergence. He called it a major breakthrough but I never understood it. He was all set to spring it on an unsuspecting public when something else snagged his attention and he forgot all about it. Now it just sits here until I stumble onto the notes and can figure it out or we need the space for something else."
He then took Max to a cluttered corner with a computer monitor on a desk, surrounded by piles of paper and several empty cups.
"This is my spot. The last couple of years, I've been glued to this box. I first got it to organize the archives. Your father generated so much stuff, I thought I'd go crazy. But then I got hooked on the games and that's all I've really done since I discovered them."
Max raised his eyebrows. "Two years of computer games?"
Victor shrugged and said, "I even started making up my own and, of course, marketing them. No one can say that this shop ever let a potential profit gather dust. My latest is called 'Teenage Hostage.' Want to try it?"
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