Her jaw worked; she kept staring at the photograph. “Of course, Feynman died before Martin was born, but he started reading about him when he was still in junior high, and then he collected everything he could, books and so on. Martin’s first science project, when he was twelve, was trying to show how Feynman figured out what made the space shuttle blow up.
“Martin made six rockets, three with faulty O-rings and three without. He tested them; he wanted the faulty one to crash at the science fair, but he couldn’t make it happen because the atmosphere this near the ground isn’t cold enough, as any fool would have known. So then he tried doing the experiment in dry ice, which Len thought was such a wonderful idea he went out and filled the garage with it. Toby Susskind, one of the neighborhood boys who came around to stare at the rockets, he passed out from the dry ice, and his father acted like I’d murdered him.”
She waved a hand at the models above his workstation. “Those are the last two. Martin kept them after he saw he had to give up the idea. He was that upset, as if it was the end of the world. Len took it seriously, too, even though I told them to forget about it. Rockets. Rockets do nothing but kill people, I said, but that didn’t worry either of them for one second.”
Poor Martin, growing up in this desert. At least his grandfather had entered into his enthusiasms. It must have seemed like a wonderful adventure to the old man, trying to fill a room with enough freezing air to bring down a rocket. And then they’d come inside to Kitty and her bitter, biting comments, colder than a garage full of dry ice.
I changed the subject abruptly, saying I wanted to look through Martin’s papers, and get a look at his computer. Kitty wasn’t happy about that. First she told me it wouldn’t do any good, but when I said, “You never know,” she insisted on pulling up a chair near Martin’s computer monitors to watch me.
“I know Charlotte trusts you, but I never saw you before, I need to watch what you’re doing.”
I couldn’t fault her for her caution with a stranger in her house, but when I warned her it might take some time, she merely clutched the edges of the chair, as if she thought I would carry her out.
In fact, it took no time at all. When I tried to power up the computers, nothing happened. I stared at the screens for a long moment. Martin had a kit of small tools in a tray on his desk. I unscrewed the backs of both CPUs. When I had them open, I saw he’d removed the drives.
Whatever he’d discovered that didn’t add up, he was concerned about it enough that he didn’t want anyone getting a look at his files. I’m not a computer whiz, but Martin was: he must have figured that even if he zeroed out the drives, a pro could reconstruct his files.
When I told Kitty what he’d done, she gave me the vacant look that was starting to get on my nerves. If she’d been my age or younger I would have shouted at her to wake up, be alert, but she was an old woman, she was in trouble, she didn’t need me arguing with her.
In as many ways as I could think of, I tried to get her to remember what else Martin had said his last weeks at home. Nothing else when he left the house that final day? Nothing about friends, or coworkers, or projects he’d been assigned to over the summer? Nothing at the meals they’d shared those last few weeks?
No, it was like him to be withdrawn. He liked to torment her by thinking about equations when she could have used a little company. Didn’t Martin see how lonely she was since Len’s passing?
I finally gave up on it and started looking through the desk drawers. Like the rest of Martin’s monastic space, these were almost empty. He’d kept his notebooks from high school, which included printouts of his history and English essays. He’d written a number of times about Feynman’s life and work. The essays were filled with red ink and comments like, “You need to learn to construct a paragraph and an argument,” or, “See me if you want to rewrite this.”
Other binders contained problem sets, with Martin’s answers written out in a tiny, careful hand. From long-ago calculus classes, I vaguely recognized some of the symbols—derivatives, integrals, polynomials. On one problem set, a teacher wrote, “You might find it easier if you took the following route,” and then included a different series of equations. Almost all were marked “100,” and twice, “Bravo, Martin. Beyond amazing.”
Those comments seemed to be the only thing in his room that showed a connection to the outside world. He had a photo of a rough mountainside tucked into one notebook, but there were no pictures of friends, no remnants of camping trips. A couple of ribbons from cross-country meets where his team had finished second or third, that was it.
For a gregarious boy, this beautifully built hideaway would have made the perfect hangout. For Martin, the isolation must have added another layer of painful loneliness to his life.