Irish Girl

Lucky Gorseman

88 Lucky Gorseman A river divides the campus now as ever, not equally, but so utterly that a citylike distinction can’t be helped: East Side, West Side. The East Side is philosophy and English and art and music and no decent places to drink. This is my side. I live here in an 8-plex with a Russian poet I met the day I moved in and haven’t seen since. He’s got an American girlfriend on the West Side, the Russian poet does, so I don’t take it personally. In fact everything good is over there: pizza, beer, dancing, undergrads, all the hard sciences. The West Side, some say, is the Best Side. But those who say it lack perspective, I think—or information. Certainly memory: few of them were here sixteen years ago; many were barely walking. Safe to say I’m the only one who was eleven and had a father who was on a hit-list but who, by the sheerest, dumbest luck imaginable, lived. R Dad had been big in Canada for his work with comets, but what the Americans loved about him was his software.This was back in the day, when a computer was something. He taught himself code and wrote a program that, properly installed, would predict the trajectories of all the known large-body objects, or LBOs, of the solar system for the next 5,000 years, including (this was the juicy part) any potential Earth collisions. His impact scenarios were Lucky Gorseman 89 strictly “low probability-high consequence” affairs, and he did not dwell on consequences other than to size the hurtling objects relative to the (then-postulated) whopper that cooked the T-Rex crowd—but the program was still a hit. He named it “Trajectory Analysis and Prediction System” without a thought, he swore, to the acronym—and America came calling. My mother and I climbed aboard and saw the States through the skewed lens of the visiting professor: Berkeley, Cambridge, Austin, Iowa City. We lived in the houses of other traveling eggheads and slept in their beds. The public schools saved me a seat. Each town had its sky and each sky had its quirks and each quirk could only be properly studied (pondered, admired, loved) through the local megascope. While Dad did that, Mom and I walked. She’d been a topography student herself once upon a time, and her priority was always to know the land. She was a petite and mighty female strider and I was her huffing big fatty son. Likely she hoped to slim me down with so much walking, for my own sake, for the pounding I was taking in these American schools, but I came home to Hostess cakes and undid the mileage. These were brainy, serious, proto-geek parents, and I was coming along nicely—until Iowa, my eleventh year, after which I began to drift away like space junk. I drifted so far that I came arcing back sixteen years later as a different kind of geek altogether : the writing kind. Was it fate? Was it cosmic? No such thing in the movement of objects, Dad would say: only chances. There’d been a small but nonzero chance I would return to Iowa, he would say. And that had been enough. R I admit I’m on tricky ground, here. Some days just the wind off the river, muscling over from the west, turns me into the anxious little porker I was. In writer’s class I experience disabling fits of 90 irish girl heartbeat whenever the girl across the way smiles. She’s a smiler, is all, I tell myself; she’s the grown-up model of a certain popular, empress type girl who would defend a tubby like me but never kiss him. And yet, here she comes, one day, the smiler—right up to me after class to see if I want to join a small search party heading west. “Across the river—?” I ask. “For beers—?” she says. And away we go. Walking again. She is the youthful spirit of my mother and she is taking me across the river and up the hill and on into a bar-and-grill I know too well, one block from Barnard Hall, the very bar-and-grill where my father would send me with quarters for the old arcade game (older than...