Falling Objects

18 Minute Read

Turning and turning in the widening gyre 
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

Part I. Atonement

Theologians and philosophers have debated for centuries whether the character of God—however one conceives of or dismisses the idea—ever changes. The imponderable goes something like this: If God never changes, how did God become God in the first place? (A related imponderable imagines the existence of God both in and outside the progressive field of time.) In drafting Twice Light, the dilemma-busting scenario that occurred to me when considering ways to change the past is that if God could tap into past actions and somehow amend them—if there really were an Entropy Storage Tank out there and a deity to crash it—God could speak without equivocation of a Never-Changing-Self. And if God, why not God’s creations?

While at Oxford in 2011, I stepped into a small display alcove in the Bodleian Library commemorating the 400th anniversary of the publishing of the 1611 King James Version of the Bible, a substantial portion of which was translated there. On exhibit were editions of English Bibles dating back to the 1300s, among them a foundational work published in 1526 by William Tyndale. Some scholars attribute to the Tyndale Bible over 70% of Old Testament and 80% of New Testament word choices that nearly a century later made their way into the King James. From surviving fragments of copies (of copies) of original Greek and Aramaic full and (mostly) partial manuscripts, Tyndale, an Oxford and Cambridge scholar, and priest, is credited with giving us turns of phrase like “the powers that be,” “my brother’s keeper,” and “the skin of our teeth.” There were times during his translation when to find just the right English equivalent; he would form multi-word portmanteaux to convey non-translatable Hebrew or Greek concepts. We have him to thank for compounds like fisherman, castaway, busybody, Passover, and beautiful. One portmanteau of doctrinal note–Atonement–Tyndale gifted to us after contemplating the sin offering mentioned the twenty-ninth chapter of Exodus, translated by John Wycliffe 150 years earlier, as “a pleasant sacrifice.

And they shall eat the, because the attonmet was made therewith to fyll their handes and to sanctifie the: but a straunger shal not eate therof, because they are holie.

William Tyndale, Exodus, Chapter 29, Verse 33

The sin offering was an aspect of the Law given to the Hebrews as a forward-facing reminder that the Messiah would one day redeem them from their sins. In the meantime, the burden of those sins could be symbolically transferred to a surrogate, usually an animal—Tyndale also gave us the word scapegoat—serving as a proxy for a future Savior to be slain at the altar for the cleansing of the offender. Since the sacrificial animal is then prepared to be internalized (eaten) by the priest, Tyndale visualizes the resolution of the tension intrinsic to the symbology of the sin offering as an At-One-Ment. Atonement was for Tyndale the coming together in restored unity of God and God’s otherwise estranged creations. From Exodus onward, Tyndale rendered similar concepts as Atonement a dozen more times in the Old and New Testaments.

***

As kids, my friends and I enjoyed the occasional mischief that, like so many misguided villains, we justified in the name of science, at least to our parents. On a five-mile hike into a mountain canyon above our homes, my friend Alan and I thought we’d test the motive force of the running snowmelt rushing down the mountain through the attractive nuisance of an open-topped concrete aqueduct. Our nominal intent was to test whether the city’s water supply could be diverted from its designated course by, say, a tree branch or, “I know, that boulder!” (It couldn’t, at least not by the heaviest rock two 11-year-old boys could heft between them.) Rocks may not float, but they are no match for steeply pitched downhill runoff.

To our complete glee and with Alan’s accelerant, now falling faster than 32 feet per second, per second, the solid mass of reactive urethane exploded on impact into a million pieces!

In junior high, my friends Penrod and Tyler joined our mischief-making when the three of us asked the university bowling alley if we could repurpose its no longer functional inventory to support a latter-day retesting of Galileo’s grand experiment to prove the Law of Falling Bodies. We carried three 15-pound balls to the top of the university football stadium and dropped them off the back wall to what we hypothesized would be their certain demolition. To legitimize our pseudoscientific assay, we dropped each ebony-colored orb alongside an optic yellow tennis ball we rummaged when passing the university courts on our way to the stadium. Not exactly as Galileo predicted, the first two solid reactive urethane (resin) balls we dropped hit the concrete pavement a little ahead of their two-ounce, hollowed-out, yellow-felt-covered rubber chasers. Aristotle would have been pleased. But had we actually cared about real science, we might have chalked up the finish line asynchrony to wind resistance or air displacement differences between the fuzzy and the slick and the fact that nearly a mile above sea level, a bowling ball will slice air like a cannon shot. But when we saw what happened after each unstoppable ball collided with the immovable pavement, we instantly pivoted our attention from Galileo to Newton. As expected, the flubber-like construction of the tennis balls governed by Newton’s signature equal and opposite reaction carried them a few vertical feet straight back toward us. But the bowling balls? To our amazement (and chagrin), after hitting the concrete sidewalk, both balls bounced so high that at their apex they appeared almost close enough to catch!

With one remaining bombshell in our repertoire, we were loath to abandon the spectacle we had schlepped those balls over two miles and 10 flights of stairs to witness. For our final assay, Penrod, Tyler, and I told junior high star wrestler and former boulder tosser Alan not to simply release the third bowling ball but to heft it high above his head and then, with both hands, hurl it straight to earth as hard as he could. (We had exhausted our supply of tennis balls by then but having vindicated either Galileo or Aristotle—we weren’t particular—we were now down to the real hypothesis we had set out to explore.) To our complete glee and with Alan’s accelerant, now falling faster than 32 feet per second, per second, the solid mass of reactive urethane exploded on impact into a million pieces! We then scampered to the ground to see what the inside of a bowling ball looked like (I’ll spare you the trouble and the mess: it looks just like the outside of a bowling ball) and then, sensing for the first time our vulnerability for having trespassed the facility of a university we did not belong to, making a complete mess on its grounds, and possibly neglecting to ask its bowling alley attendant if he didn’t really want to preserve his inventory of spare balls, ran as fast as we could from the scene of the crime.

***

If I dropped a bowling ball from a great height, not from a stadium or onto an aqueduct, but into a still body of water, once the ball disappeared below the surface, I would expect to see a series of concentric ripples emanating from the center point of impact. But that’s not what happens, at least not ultimately. Like the concussive waves of energy that arise inside an unstoppable bowling bowl encountering an immovable slab of concrete, when the ball breaks the surface tension of a confined body of water—say, a small pond—what happens to the water is that as soon as the energy of the splash transfers to its surface, the wave of ripples that help absorb its impact eventually encounters other objects in its path—a rowboat, say, a jetty, or a shoreline. And just like two bowling ball’s bouncing back from the concrete or a single ball shattering into a million pieces, when the wave doubles back to collide against itself, something kaleidoscopic happens on the surface of the water. With each overlapping ripple, an interference pattern emerges from which it is impossible to predict with the naked eye and unplugged brain the ultimate panoply of lines that will eventually emanate from the impact point.

***

Whether from an instinctive realization of what was about to happen, some hidden hand holding back my own, or a novel inner voice I could neither identify nor hear, backing me off that ledge, I dropped the brick to the ground before launching a bowling-ball of a burden I would schlep the rest of my life.

Like ripples on the water, the wave connecting our past with our present and our present with our future is not slick like the inside-and-out, cured resin of a bowling ball. The unpredictably tardy lines that bounce away from the shoreline are fuzzy, like the felt surface of tennis balls dragged by their atmosphere to sometimes unpredictable depths. When I was about seven years old, our next-door neighbors, like the Second Little Pig, decided they wanted their wooden house to be made of bricks. From do-it-your-self father Charlie to at-the-time youngest son Johnny, the Pope family hauled into their yard a great stack of pink and black-speckled building blocks sufficient to cover over the facade of their wood-paneled home. As the project progressed, and the rest of us neighborhood kids watched Lloyd and Johnny Sawyer tending hod and laying bricks, all of us wanted in. Down with crowdsourcing the project, Charlie taught me to trowel mortar, square up the side, tamp the brick in place, and scrape away the excess. Although there were plenty of bricks and mortar to go round, Charlie hadn’t anticipated the number of little volunteers who wanted to play Mud Fight and thus demand access to his hand tools. Like the crazy gods in the movie, Charlie possessed but a single “Coke bottle” trowel to spare.

Was I, like Hippocrates, to “declare the past” about the near-miss bricklaying mishap that befell my older sister Rebecca that summer, I should pay special attention to the direction a brick bounces when hitting the ground from a not-so-great height. As sometimes happens when someone wants into a locked, zero-sum game, they appropriate someone else’s stuff to help them get started. My trowel, the one Charlie had taught me to use when helping Lloyd lay brinks on the east side of the Pope house, had somehow gone missing when I wasn’t looking. Charlie was working the west side, and so missed the escalation that followed but not the howl of its climax. One unremembered thing led to another until there I was, my sister’s keeper, standing above her as she knelt beside the mortar box, my missing trowel in her hand. In my own hand, hefted high above my angry head as Alan would later do, was a heavy, jagged, rectangular, pink, and black-speckled object.

“Give it back!” came my selfish demand.

“Make me!” returned her every-child reply.

Whether from an instinctive realization of what was about to happen, some hidden hand holding back my own, or a novel inner voice I could neither identify nor hear backing me off that ledge, I dropped the brick to the ground before launching a bowling-ball of a burden I would schlep the rest of my life. But like the ball that might have shattered on impact or pushed out even arcs across a pond, the brick that fell to earth that day tumbled like a stone in rushing water toward my sister’s trowel hand. By the time it came to rest on her fingers, whatever inertia the brick still retained opened a cut that sent her howling back to our house. The ripple effect of my irascible temper in those days lasted several hours, with my getting more than a talking-to by my father when he got home. Compared to my friend Andrew, however, I got off lucky that day.

***

If in a single moment a brick could fly or fall, a bowling ball bounce or shatter, a pond ripple or still, an earth move, a God change; then I had a lot to learn from people like Andrew.

In May 1977, Andrew and I had just exited the Mont Blanc tunnel on our downhill run to the Mediterranean when the topic of atonement came up. Andrew and I were part of a volunteer organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, that occasionally engaged in conversations with the Swiss or any number of English- or French-speaking residents curious enough about religion to invite us into their homes for an hour. Ten years my senior, and my supervisor in the organization we belonged to, Andrew was in the passenger seat of a white Peugeot wagon working on notes for a seminar the two of us would conduct the next day in Nice, France. I was at the wheel.

When I was a boy,” he begins, tying off some loose end of C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain or some such, “maybe ten or eleven years old, I did something devastatingly unthinkable to my younger sister. We were playing near a construction site in Connecticut where I grew up, and I threw a brick in her direction.

Wait, what?

45 years later, I don’t recall whether he, like I, made his toss in anger or if his mishap was an accident.

“The brick hit her square in the face.”

What was he even saying?

“As you might imagine, the damage was irreparable. The scar dogged her entire life. She withdrew socially. Didn’t date. She may never marry; or bear children, which she sorely wanted to do. How do I atone for that? No matter how many times I say I’m sorry, I cannot go back in time. And I can’t spend the rest of my life with the rest of her life, trying to make it right. The whole thing was a blip. Lasted just one second. But it has stayed with me every minute since.”

Harvard-educated with a Ph.D. in organizational behavior, Andrew never just talked story. There was always a message, an underpinning principle, a veiled self-commitment to the well-being of his listener. We had gotten a late start that morning when the first car I began driving overheated on the uphill run into the Alps. The second reason for our trip was a rescue mission to med-evac, a very ill member of our team who needed to board a plane to bring her back to Switzerland. Still in the mountains, clumsily changing gears with each switchback, Andrew pronounces something like, “So, it’s 11:00 o’clock. We need to be at her apartment in Nice by four so we can get her on the plane by five.” That was AndrewSpeak for, “You better start breaking some laws here, Scott,” words he would never, ever say to my face.

“Atonement—at-one-ment—is about bringing everything together, in one place, for all moments,” Andrew explains. “But what I did to my sister that day blew everything apart. My action followed her, not me, not directly anyway; my pain would come later. At every million-million turn, I couldn’t be there for her, making right the damage I had inflicted, making sure the scar of my stupid, stupid action could somehow be erased, corrected, blotted out. But there are some things we cannot do on our own. I needed someone else, something else, some force outside the system that was my life to enter the system that was hers and fix it. But fix it how? Undo it? Repair it? Make it all go away? How’s that going to happen? I needed a savior. I needed atonement.”

Andrew went on, but I was by then at another construction site far away, a brick raised above my own head, my life, and my sister’s, at a precipice. Still a decade away from my speculations about entropy or some other incarnation of Hippocrates’ rumination that the past can be sent rippling in a counter direction to the original arc of a life and still recover, I am not ready to absorb the possibility that the past can literally be changed, releasing its hostage grip on the present, not to mention the future. If, in a single moment, a brick could fly or fall, a bowling ball bounce or shatter, a pond ripple or still, an earth move, a God change, then I had a lot to learn from people like Andrew.

***

Part II. There’s Going to Be an Accident

The car strikes the boy still running, in the upper leg, with a force that must have felt to him like a truck. I watch in slow motion as 318 horses of police-cruiser tensile steel toss his rag-doll body twenty feet through the air toward the spot where a split second earlier, I was bone-certain there was going to be an accident.

Ten years ago this month, I was informed by a bit of code that a Mr. Tuan Vu had glanced at my profile on the business social media site LinkedIn. His name immediately caught my attention, and I sent him the following query.

“I noted you had visited my LinkedIn profile, and it got me thinking. I met a Tuan Vu about 30 years ago in Anaheim, California. He was a child. Crazy question, but have you ever lived in California by chance?”

Mr. Vu replied immediately.

“I was a child then, [and] did pass through Anaheim. I don’t remember much as my stay there was very brief.”

He then explained that he was my company’s new software rep and would I “have some time to meet next week over lunch or coffee to chat?”

I would.

“Second weird question. Were [you] by any chance injured–hit by a car–when living in Anaheim? I know. Really strange question. I can tell you the story behind why I ask when we meet.”

“Now you’ve got my curiosity up! No, no car accidents in Anaheim. Let me know when you can do lunch because I’m really curious now! :-)”

***

At lunch in Tysons Corner, Virginia, the next week, I learned that Mr. Tuan Vu—”Please call me Tuan”—truly did not remember much about his time in Anaheim.

“I know I’m rude to keep asking about Anaheim, but one more impertinent question?”

“Then can we talk about my software?”

“Then we can talk about your software. Do you remember where in Anaheim you lived in 1983?”

He did not.

“You said we could talk shop,” he laughed. “What’s with all the intrigue? Online you said something about a car accident.” He seemed to be enjoying the cat and mouse though it was still not clear which one of us was to be the other’s lunch. “It was a long time ago. And I was very young.”

“Of course you were. But before we talk shop, I need to tell you a story.”

***

It’s a quiet Sunday afternoon in Anaheim, California, in 1983. I’m driving my great aunt’s 1966 Dodge Coronet 440—think Car 54 Where You Are You? but without the black stripe and cherry on top. It’s a heavy-duty police-cruiser grade sedan with a 318 horsepower engine. I’m not into power cars. The Coronet was a wedding concession from my grandmother’s sister that came with a stipulation I would not learn until well after her passing. My Aunt Jennie had expected from her gift that I would let her drive “her” car once in a while despite the restraining order her nephew—my father—had slapped on her against ever again getting behind the wheel.

(I don’t see how Jennie had earned such a sanction. Having driven the car only 43,000 miles in the twelve years she owned it—on the milk run, to church, around the neighborhood, never traveling beyond 20 miles an hour—what damage could she have done?)

I am driving with Jennie’s same caution that day as I pick my way through a neighborhood not my own. I had just dropped off an acquaintance from church in an unfamiliar part of town, and because I had been talking to my passenger instead of paying attention to how I got into her neighborhood, I am carefully going home by another way. At what I consider a safe speed, I turn onto a densely packed cluster of apartments, cars lining both sides of the narrowing road, when from within a place that to this day I still associate with that ill-used enclave in the back of my head reserved for wonderment and glory, I hear a new yet instantly familiar voice.

“There’s going to be an accident.”

It would be another four years before I book-learned in theory what I had experienced over a decade of driving practice up to that point—that certain motor skills after sufficient conscious repetition, compile into the subconscious mind to be governed in future by something we label muscle memory. Undistracted by the common routines involved in driving—foot on gas; hands on wheel; eyes left, right, center, side-view, rearview, repeat—with all that signal and noise shunted silently somewhere else, the forecourt of our brain is cleared to pick up and respond to new and less familiar stimuli jumping in and out of focus. Speed limit: 25 mph. Cars parked tightly to my left and right. (Why are there so many? Shouldn’t some of them be moving?) Nothing to see here.

“There’s going to be an accident.”

There is? I better slow down. I should pay attention so I don’t miss anything. Where should I be looking? Should I stop? What does an accident look like before it happens? Where is that voice coming from?

Whoever, whatever I’m hearing, he/she/they/it wants me to do something with this—is it prescient?— signal I’m receiving.

The voice does not shout. Its still smallness seems non-urgent. It is firm, definitive, and unequivocal. But it said, “accident.” Yet there is no panic in it. Only calm.

But if there is going to be an accident, how can I be calm? I should look down the road in case I need to testify or something. (I should have paid better in Boy Scouts.) I can’t see anything. There are too many parked cars saturating my peripheral vision.

“There’s going to be an accident.”

From muscle memory, my foot comes off the gas and hovers over the brake. I feel myself coasting, ready to slam the pedal. Approaching an intersection a hundred meters ahead, I squint for signs of traffic —will the accident happen there? I see nothing. If there’s going to be an accident, why is there no one around to cause it? And why are there so many parked cars?

In all my questions, I never once second guess what I somehow know to the marrow is a voice I can take to the bank. Whatever its source, its intent, it is naming an undeniable truth about my immediate future. A future I Just. Can’t. See—

And then I do. But only just. Still locked on the approaching intersection, I catch two blurred objects rushing from my right.

Children.

The first, chased by the second, flashes into my periphery from nowhere—a driveway’s chink in an unbroken wall of stationary vehicles. They’re headed straight into my path.

The taller boy spots me and lunges ahead to grab the smaller one. He is inches too late. My foot instinctively pounces.

The car strikes the boy still running, in the upper leg, with a force that must have felt to him like a truck. I watch in slow motion as 318 horses of police-cruiser tensile steel toss his rag-doll body twenty feet through the air toward the spot where a split second earlier, I was bone-certain there was going to be an accident.

Tuan Vu was a few days shy of turning three years old. That Sunday afternoon, he had been playing tag in front of his apartment building with friends and an older brother who, in all the fun, had lost track of the driveway’s end. According to the police investigator first on the scene, the accident came within a hair’s breadth of launching both Tuan and myself into a completely altered future from the one we will descend into together at a local hospital. Visiting him there that evening, I am tearfully relieved to learn he has suffered only a broken leg at the spot where my car shot him down the street and a mild concussion where his head must have hit the grill, hood, or pavement.

The officer’s mashup of the data he collected at the scene—the posted speed limit; the weight and power of my weighty, power car; that in my cautious coasting, I might have slowed my speed to 20 miles an hour; the absence of discernible skid marks on the road’s surface; the location of the driveway; the likely impact spot; Tuan’s negligible body weight and distant landing zone; post-accident testing of the car’s brakes—all led him to extrapolate that had the car been traveling any faster, Tuan’s little body would not have bounced mercifully away from the car, but fallen under it.

When I return to the hospital the next day, a nurse gives it as gospel that because the injury to Tuan’s left leg had pierced its growth plate, he will probably never outgrow what she prophecies will be a lifelong limp. When I return the third day, Tuan has already been discharged.

***

Looking back, I might have spared Mr. Vu some, or maybe most of what I recounted to him during the first half-hour of our “business” lunch. If he had been the boy I once knew, he would already know the details. If he was not Little Tuan Vu, what had been my story’s point? Because of what happened next, however, with 40 years of hindsight, I now realize that whether Little Tuan and Big Tuan were one and the same person or just two lives tangentially linked by only a common Vietnamese name, the story i have just narrated was somehow no longer theirs. From where I was sitting, it could be only mine.

When I refold and put away my handkerchief, Big Tuan knows he has been signaled to something. Anything. As sparingly as he can, he drops the hammer like a feather.

“Wow. That’s some story. Thank you so much for sharing it with me. It can’t have been easy.”

And…?

“But to my knowledge, I’ve never broken a bone in my body. And I don’t have an older brother.”

***

Kari and I once performed together Eugene Ionesco’s Bald Soprano. It’s an absurd parody of communication about a woman and a man who meet for the first time as they simultaneously knock on the same door of their same dinner party host’s home in Paris. As they introduce themselves, they discover to their mutual flabbergast that both of them arrived there on the same train, had sat next to each other in the same cabin, having earlier in their journey embarked from the same town and station. They further worked out that they had for years been living in the same house, sleeping in the same bed, raising together what most certainly would have been the same daughter, confirmed by the obvious and bizarre fact that their daughter was born with one red eye and one green eye.

“We must be married!” they exclaim before sharing a passionate reunion kiss.

After the dinner party’s housemaid ushers the happy couple inside, she whispers a spoiling aside to the audience.

“They’re not really married. You see, his daughter’s right eye is red, alright. But her daughter’s right eye is green.”

Brilliantly playing his part in Ionesco’s masterpiece now playing at a restaurant in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, Mr. Vu has respectfully participated not in a staccato dialog between reunited strangers but a rambling monolog he will spoil in the nick of time by calmly revealing that both of his eyes are chestnut brown. Wouldn’t he have known if he had broken his leg as a child? Wouldn’t his parents have told him? Would he not still, today, as the hospital nurse had predicted, walk with a limp? (Might Tuan Vu be as common a name in Vietnamese as John Smith is in English?) Where had been the mutual tears of recognition? (And if I had an older brother, I’d certainly remember it.)

“Im sorry, Scott, but with the utmost respect, you’ve got the wrong Tuan Vu.”

***

After all, God is God because he remembers.

Elie Wiesel

Like a bowling ball dropped from a great height; or a brick aimed at a little girl; or a car crushing the growth plate of a little boy’s leg; the past presses the present into the future.

During the years that followed his sister’s wounding, how does Andrew find atonement? After nearly running his two-ton car over the body of a little child, how does Scott learn to forget? By now, I know in my heart—and by heart—the owner of the voice I heard seconds before impact that day. I have been given four decades to ponder the point of vantage it selected before speaking. Was it presiding over the accident zone? Did it cry out from a driveway full of ebullient children? Had it condescended from my future? Or boiled up from my past? Did the voice even exist in time?

I am left to consider what I can only think of as the life-editing voice-over from a snippet of Little Tuan’s hour upon the stage that, for a split instant, I had been allowed to direct. Not that in any way, my actions dictated or otherwise predetermined the future of a child’s life. Who of us can say or know such a thing? But for whatever reason—Tuan’s relatively good fortune; my momentarily addled peace of mind; the life the two of us continued to enjoy on a common planet, beginning in a common hospital room after a common moment played out continually before Heaven—the conscious and subconscious directions my spinal cord relayed to my foot that day in obeisance to a message delivered to an inside piece of me could only have originated from an outside piece of me still tethered just within reach, forever changed us both, in a single, at one, moment.

The past does press upon the present, the present upon the future. And if both are so, somewhere, thanks to some cosmic, entropic strip-mine of a storage unit in the antipodes of some disused corner of this or some other universe, the future—whatever that word means outside of time—must be given license to press forward upon the past until it, too, is differently remembered. And if that is so, if in God’s eternal moment pain once atoned is no longer painful, nor in fact ever was, who am I to take pains to hold it so dear?

***

Postscript:

I wrote this post in December 2022. Finding it more apropos the current holy day season, I have updated and reposted it this month, April 2023. To do so, I tracked down and included the verbatim LinkedIn messaging transcript between Mr. Vu and myself from 2013. I also contacted Mr. Vu for the first time in a decade to share with him the updated version to make sure I had accurately depicted our online and face-to-face dialog. Shortly after our lunch conversation, I began working in Switzerland, thus removing the professional connection between the two of us. It was nice to re-establish contact with someone with whom I shared an important life experience, even if that experience proved not to be the one I expected. I did not write about it as it was Tuan’s and not mine to share. But once we put the Bald Soprano moment behind us at lunch that day, Tuan was gracious enough to share with me the harrowing tale of how his family made it from Vietnam to California during the treacherous aftermath of the Vietnam War. Perhaps his story might one day be shared on these pages.

***