Phil's reverie popped. A slender dark-haired girl his age was looking at him. Her jawline was strikingly angled, her eyes clear, her mouth intelligent and kind. Her one nonidealized feature was her nose, which was a bit larger than normal, though it sat quite harmoniously in the calm oval of her face.
"Me? My father was the teacher."
"Oh God, I'm sorry, you're Kurt Gottner's son, aren't you? You must be so weighted that you don't know what to do."
"Yes, exactly. Thank you. My name is Phil." He held out his hand.
"I'm Yoke."
"That's a nice easy name. What was your connection with my dad?"
"Oh, I'm visiting Terri and Tre Dietz, so I came along with them to pay my respects. Tre's been so excited about your father's work, he talks about him all the time. Your father must have been a great man. How horrible that the wowo killed him."
"It's a nightmare. Everyone's scared to sleep in his house anymore. I've been down here in a motel since Thursday-- today's Saturday, right?"
"Yes. Time's strange for you now, isn't it? My mother died at Christmas --which is another reason I'm here--and for the few days afterward it was like there was this glowing light everywhere and time wasn't moving at all. I even started smoking for a week, something about the cigarettes made it easier to chop up the time. And where I come from, smoking is practically impossible."
"Cigarettes, what a concept," said Phil. "If I let myself, I'd be drunk and stoned through all this for sure. I'm glad I don't have to do that. I'm sorry to hear about your mother. She died on Christmas Day?"
"Christmas Eve. She was alone. I feel terrible." Yoke's eyes moistened.
"Poor Yoke," said Phil, and went on talking lest the two of them break down.
"You're right about the kind of glow everywhere. Luminous. Realer than real. My father's ashes are in that little box on the rug on the lawn and the rest of him is who knows where, he's really dead and someday I'm going to die too. This --" Phil gestured at the old building around them, at the misty trees and the people outside. "This is what there is. We're like ants under lichen. Actual organisms crawling around in this shallow layer of fuzz on the Earth."
"Lichen?" smiled Yoke, wiping off her eyes. "I just saw natural lichen for the first time this week --forest lichen instead of the stuff inside moldies. Terri took me on a tour of the Big Basin redwoods. The ranger said, 'Alice Alga took a lichen to Freddie Fungi, and ever since, their marriage has been on the rocks.'
" When Yoke hit the "lichen" pun, she giggled and raised her eyebrows.
"Or maybe we're like beetles under bark," said Phil, trying to stay poetic and serious. "Or rabbits in a briar patch. I keep having this funny vision of how glued to the Earth's surface we are. And how shallow the atmosphere is. Gaia's skin."
"I totally know," said Yoke in a heavy Val accent. Phil couldn't tell if she was mocking him or if that was a way she really talked.
Outside, the last speaker had finished and people were standing up and starting to mill around.
"Everyone's going to hit the canapes now," said Yoke. "Big-time. Before the crowd gets here I need to go to the bathroom."
"So that's why you asked if I'm a teacher," said Phil. "It's up those stairs, Yoke."
"Thanks, Phil. It's nice to meet you. Let's talk some more in a minute." Phil watched Yoke go up the stairs. She had a high, perfectly rounded butt. But she moved up the stairs very slowly, taking one step at a time. It was so painful to watch that Phil looked away for a minute. When he looked back, Yoke was at the top. She smiled and waved as if she'd just mounted some great peak.
"Oh there you are." It was Kevvie, chewing a stick of celery. "Why'd you run off in the middle of the service?"
"It was getting to be too much for me." Phil glanced up the stairs. No more Yoke. He sort of didn't want her to see him with Kevvie. "Let's go out on the porch."
"Aren't you supposed to be doing something about your father's ashes?"
"Oh God, I forgot."
Phil hurried back down the steps to where his family stood around the rug on the ground. The reddish madrone wood of the eight-sided box made Phil think of a stop sign. Da's ashes.
Angular little sister Jane hugged Phil. Willow gave him a brittle smile. Eve, Isolde, and great-aunt Hildegarde each gave him a kiss. Rex shook his hand and clapped his shoulder, Aunt Zsuzsi patted his cheek, cousins Gina and Mary smiled sadly.
Kurt had often said he wanted them to dig his ashes into the soil under a certain big oak tree in a park near Palo Alto, he and the kids had strolled there together many times. The tree was split near its base into a pair of great twin trunks. Phil had been placed in charge of informally sneaking the ashes into the public land, so now he put the flat little box in his coat pocket. Eve had forced him to buy a suit for the funeral; it was the first time in his life Phil had ever worn one.
They stood around for a bit, sadly reminiscing. Jane recalled how Kurt had always rhapsodized about the oak tree, how he'd gone on about fractals and gnarliness and self-organized criticality.
"I remember another thing Da used to say about that tree," said Phil. "He talked about how the week before the psychologist C. G. Jung died, Jung had a dream about an oak tree blown over in a storm with great nuggets of gold found twined in its roots. 'I want to be remembered like that,' Da always said. 'That my life sent down deep roots that pulled up gold.' " Phil sighed heavily. "I don't know if he really made it."
"Of course he did," said Isolde. "Think of his students."
"And who knows what the wowo will lead to," said Rex. "Don't underestimate your old dad, Phil. He was a pisser, but he was deep."
"Your father loved you very much, Phil," said Willow reproachfully.
"When he wasn't too drunk," muttered Phil.
"What?"
"Never mind."
"Speaking of wowos, look at this," said Jane, hurriedly getting something out of her purse. "Willow gave this to me."
There was knotted little bit of metal in the palm of Jane's thin little hand --a gold ring tied in an overhand knot with no sign of a break or a weld. Like a tiny sculpture.
"It's his wedding-ring," said Willow. "The gimmie found it on our bedroom floor. If you look closely, you can still make out the inscription, To Kurt from Willow.' It's creepy the way it's knotted. I don't want it."
"I think it's been knotted in the fourth dimension," said Jane. She'd always been a better student of their father's ideas than Phil. "In the fourth dimension you can knot a closed loop by lifting part of it ana out of our space, moving it across, and then pushing it back kata into our space." Ana and kata had been Kurt Gottner's special words for the four-dimensional analogs of up and down. Jane looked at Phil with intent eyes. "This means the thing that ate Da comes from a higher dimension."
"Oh sick, there's a moldie here," interrupted Kevvie, sniffing the air. She looked around. "Over there with Tre and Terri Dietz. Who invited a moldie?" There was indeed a soft-looking figure standing with Tre and Terri Dietz, a plastic moldie shaped like a barrel-chested sixty-year-old man, white-bearded and white-haired, a man with a big head and high cheekbones, his skin somewhat papery in appearance. Even without the smell, you could tell he was a moldie from how flexibly he moved. Yoke was standing next to him, chatting and laughing with a bottle of soda in her hand. She looked like a fashion model.
"I think that's --you know--Cobb Anderson!" exclaimed Phil, glad for the distraction. Growing up as Kurt Gottner's son, he'd heard enough about higher dimensions to last him a lifetime. "We'll talk about it later, Jane." He hurried over to the other group, glad for another chance to be with Yoke.