Unwritten Rules of Impossible Things Read online

taking notes and jotting down equations. The hours flew by and she was still at it when her son arrived home around sunset.

  At first she didn’t even notice he was in the room. He had appeared in the doorway and, surprised to see his mom there, had tip-toed in, trying not to disturb her. He thought he could reach the desk without making any noise or knocking over any of the stuff on the floor, but he just nicked a teepee of bicycle spokes with his heel and they came clattering down, alerting his mom.

  “Philip,” she announced, looking up from her work.

  “Mom,” he cautiously replied.

  “I’m so glad to see you,” she said, putting down her work and scrambling to stand up.

  “Okay?” Phil murmured. This was not as expected. For one thing, what was she even doing there, and for another, why was she, as she put it, so glad to see him? And what was that smile on her face, and wait a minute, was she actually trying to hug him? She was. It was weird. And now she was attempting to plant a kiss on his cheek. Phil pushed away, backed away toward the door.

  “Are you all right?” he questioned her.

  “I’m wonderful,” she told him, and she held out her hands in a gesture to indicate that he could relax, that she wasn’t going to hurt him.

  “Where’s your friend?” she asked.

  “What friend?”

  “That boy who was with you this morning? And how did you two get out of the house? Did you really go out through the window? I was only offering soup, you know,” and she laughed merrily, a sound that Phil couldn’t remember hearing before in his life. It was nice. Her eyes were sparkling and her smile made him feel, feel something.

  “We’ve got to talk,” she declared, and bent down to retrieve her notebook and pencil.

  “Not now,” Phil tried to tell her. He wanted to check his computer, now more than ever. She had seen him and Marcus - not them, he understood, but the others - and they had been here, in his room, just that day

  “What were my friend and I doing?” he blurted out, realizing how stupid it sounded as soon as he said it.

  “I don’t know,” she answered directly. “You wouldn’t let me in the room, but you left your touch desk on. You were looking at some interesting things, that’s for sure. Come and look,” and she led him over to there. Phil whistled softly at the screen. His blueprints of course were familiar, but what were those scribbles? They looked like some sort of graffiti, a three-dimensional script in shades of blues and greens. There was a pile of them and as he swiped through, one after the other, he saw that no two pages contained the same patterns, but that all were connected, in some sort of progression.

  “Kind of like a flip book,” his mother commented, and Phil looked up at her, quizzically.

  “Sure,” she said, “like a flip book, but not in regular space or time. See here?”

  She used two hands to manipulate the images on the screen, pulling and spinning and pinching the virtual pages until it seemed to Phil they were popping straight out of the desk like a three-dimensional projection, but still it meant nothing to him. It was some kind of optical illusion.

  “It’s a natural language,” Marina shrugged. “A conversation in frosted glass. I don’t quite follow, but it looks like an argument to me. Or maybe not exactly an argument but as if someone was talking to himself and taking sides, a discussion. Over here there’s the rationale for justifying an action. On the other side, there, is some doubt. The colors are levels of heat, of intention. Do you know what I’ve done?” she interrupted herself.

  “Over here,” she continued, and dropped down to her hands and knees and crawled over to a pile of what looked like assorted white laundry. Phil stared after her, wondering if his mother had any idea how crazy she seemed. He looked back at the desk but the heap she had pulled out of the screen had subsided and was again the plain scribbling he’d originally seen.

  “Over here,” she repeated, and grabbing some empty tuna fish cans, a plastic toy wrench and some fabric, her fingers began weaving together a sort of small vehicle.

  “It needs some more color, of course,” she admitted, “but the principle’s solid. You see? A flying car, with lint for the wings. You bring it together with two-sided tape. Not ideal, I admit. I’m working on a theory for a cloud-like containment. That way you wouldn’t have to worry about flow.”

  She tossed the thing up in the air, and it flew. It flew briefly, that is, flapping its furry little wings a few times, then gliding quite gently down to the floor. Marina watched after it calmly and was actually quiet for a minute while she mentally calculated more thrust in the aft.

  “Mom?” Phil suggested. She didn’t answer. She began rapidly scribbling more notes in her book. Phil returned his attention to the computer. He noticed that his folders were opened, that his drawings were scanned, but whether by her or the others he had no way of knowing.

  “Mom?” he repeated, and this time she looked up.

  “Is this the way it looked this morning?”

  “Pretty much,” she replied. “I tried to put everything back the way I found it. You know your molecular collapsing won’t work, by the way. It’s nice to dream of impossible things, but some things are really just that.”

  “I guess,” Phil shrugged. He didn’t mind that she’d looked through his plans, or even that she had a critique, and he had to admit she was right, but it bugged him. In all these years, his mother had never displayed any interest in anything he was up to. Why now all at once? And had she always known about science and math? How come he didn’t know that she did?

  “I like what you’re doing with wheels,” she added, looking up from her notebook. “The trick is going to be what happens when you’ve achieved a friction coefficient near zero. How’s it going to stop? You’d need a material that could be in two states at once. Some sort of rubberized metal, perhaps.”

  “I was thinking polycarbonate”.

  “Too stable,” she quickly replied. “I was thinking more metamorphorically. Not actually in two states at once, but quantumly suggestible. I’ll give it more thought.”

  She returned her attention to her notebook.

  “Don’t you have to be going to work?”

  “Called in sick,” she told him, not looking up. “Too much to do, anyway. I might not even go back. Oh, I have to talk with Alexei. Excuse me,” and she jumped up, ran into the hall and picked up the phone. Moments later he could hear her speaking in Russian.

  “Is this really my mother?” he said to himself, and as he peered out of his room and watched her jabbering away, he couldn’t be sure. It looked like his mother. It sounded, sort of, like her. He realized with a jolt how much he’d been avoiding all of those years, and that he really didn’t know her at all.

  Chapter Nine

  He stood by the window, staring into the night. He’d looked through enough of the documents in that mysterious folder to know that he was out of his depth. He was forced to realize that all of his years of dabbling and experimenting were mere amateur hour. Sure, he was only eleven, but he’d felt so much older every time he’d pulled something off. Now he knew there was far more in just this tiny corner of the galaxy than he would ever be able to comprehend. Those weren’t notes scribbled at random on the screen, those were dissertations from beyond all human experience. He just felt it, and had that feeling confirmed almost immediately, with the arrival of two of his mother’s friends.

  Marina brought Alexei Zuprevin and his companion, Janet Boltch, straight into Phil’s room, and with barely an introduction to her son, showed them his desk. Phil found himself squished up against the window by the sheer bulk of the Boltch woman, a giantess both in height and girth, who could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty to judge from her wide flat face and thin brown hair. She was wearing an ordinary white robe of some sort, and open-toed sandals revealing long, thick unpainted nails. Her hands were rough and calloused like a carpenter’s, and her voice was loud and strong. Yet she deferred to the even taller but q
uite slender and bent old man, Zuprevin, who stank like a cigar factory and was continually brushing away his thick white hair from his lean, narrow face. His voice was as soft and indistinct as hers was the opposite, but they seemed to understand each other perfectly.

  Marina stood back with a smirk on her face as if she had pulled of some sort of secret triumph. In fact, she was pleased to be on the verge of stumping her tutor and his brash associate. How many years had she had to listen to their lectures, only vaguely understanding a small percentage no matter how hard she’d studied on the side. Alexei had been urging her to go to college for years. He saw something in her that no one else did, and she appreciated it, but never had the confidence to follow through. Janet Boltch was an obstacle in that department, seeming to scoff at the idea of a poor immigrant waitress amounting to anything ever in this world. Marina had a special scorn for Boltch, though she knew that Alexei admired and respected her immensely. Now the pair were rifling through the documents with grunts and groans of surprise and wonder. Finally Alexei stepped aside and asked Marina to show him what she’d described on the phone as multi-dimensional graffiti.

  She went to the desk and repeated her earlier steps, causing an eruption of weird shapes and lights to leap from the screen as she massaged and tweaked it in the air. Her face was filled with a glorious