Severino gazed at his mother caringly. She was sleeping, exhausted as usual. He was terrified and excited at the same time. What has happened to Mama? he wondered. She had always been listless and melancholy, a moderately fulfilled mother that struggled through an early divorce and was left saddled with the responsibility for raising a son and a daughter. By circumstance, she was stuck in the gravity of Silicon Valley, a gravity that left you afloat while its forces sucked from your pockets, every dollar you struggled to earn. Angelica knew not how to escape. She felt trapped but somehow powerless to move from under the weight of her responsibilities. She often wondered why she hadn’t moved to Tucson, near her sister, where she could better afford a life for herself and her kids. But that was a long time ago. She had made her decision. It would not be about her, it was all about Sevy and little Lolita.
When she first rented half of a dilapidated mobile home in Buena Vista mobile home park, shared by another mother and child who had been also ditched by some cabrón, Angelica was working as a night janitor with her cousins. They were lucky enough to work at two elementary schools close by. But it didn’t pay enough to get her own place. She had to endure other people’s problems in close quarters while looking after her own. But she came to regard herself as lucky. Over time she learned that her kids were attending schools in the best district in the state and from that point on, her sole mission was to stay put, no matter what she had to endure.
Then one day her cousin Miguelito, who was her lifeline and kept her working, got a good job at Stanford in the facilities department. At Stanford they liked him and soon were calling him Mikey. He got Angel a job too. She doubled her income and now carried around a university badge with great pride. The mobile home was still on its last legs but she managed to buy it and settle into a hard but stable life focused only on her kids.
Her job entailed administrative tasks related to facilities projects and ongoing maintenance. Her desk was in an unattractive building in the middle of the facilities complex at the edge of campus. But most of her time was spent out in the field, with contractors going through lists of changes and corrections noted by the engineers in her department. The bulk of the work always seemed to be in the engineering and physics buildings.
One day, two years earlier when she was new on the job, she was walking back to a physics lab under major renovation and glanced through a small window in the door to a large lecture hall. In that passing moment she caught sight of an elderly white balding man, energetically waving his arms and writing things on one of the many white boards lining the front of the lecture room. She suddenly froze, backed up a step and just stared in through that window, trying to absorb the scene in all its details. The audience appeared completely captivated, most of them leaning in, hunched over their laptops or notepads trying to record what was happening. Her gaze returned to the professor, his head swiveling between the board and the students as his lips moved rapidly. To Angel, it was just muffled sounds but suddenly she longed to hear what was being said, wondering what could be so engaging to those young students. The professor’s prominent ears caught her attention adding to the allure of expert knowledge passing from master to apprentice.
“Angelica! Whassup?” blared from behind her. It was Miguelito on his way to meet her at the same lab. She snapped out of her trance and suddenly felt a bit ridiculous and out of place. What’s a thirty three year old mamacita looking at? Stuff she got no business with.
“Primo! Is nothing. Nos vamos.” They walked deeper into the facility and reached the staircase leading to the basement laboratory where the contractors waited to hear the bad news concerning a long list of careless mistakes. Miguel started to descend but Angel turned her head to take another look back toward that lecture hall where something inexplicable had happened. She wasn’t quite sure what.
“Lo! I need to use it! I got homework. Mom’s coming soon. Then you know she’s gonna take it over. I don’t want to go to the Library again, it’s raining.”
“Okay, okay!” Lolita stood up abruptly from the small computer table where the outdated PC sat, covered with dust and stains. Their uncle Miguel had given it to Sevy as a Christmas present a few years earlier. It was already quite old even then. No one asked where it came from. If it was stolen, they were sure that Miguel would never do such a thing. But of course he knew those type of people down near his house in East Palo Alto.
The bookshelf on the wall above the PC, once used as a shrine to Sevy’s sports trophies, which were many, now brimmed over with books. It wasn’t a variety of books as one might find in a typical household bookcase. This small collection was narrowly focused on subject matter normally of interest only to graduate level physics students, purchased only because it was required for a particular advanced physics class. Other titles were more popular reading, assuming you were the type to read Stephen Hawking, Sean Carroll, Carlo Rovelli or Michio Kaku. It was a serious collection and based on the number of dog-eared pages and small slips of paper demarcating sections for future reference, these volumes were not there just for show.
A few hours later, when Angel showed up, eyes red and tired, Sevy was fortunately finished with the computer and he was in the kitchen preparing dinner, because Angel walked a straight line from the front door to the PC, dumped her backpack on the floor and sat down to coax Google to spit out answers to ten questions she had, just during the short bus ride home.
Lolita had heard her enter and ran down the short hallway from her room to wrap her arms around Angel from behind. Angel barely took notice. But then she shook herself out of it and turned to hug and acknowledge her daughter. “Mija,” Angelica whispered affectionately. “Digame que pasó contigo en la escuela.”
“Nothing Mamá. Oh yah. They took us over to Gunn and there was a lady she talked to us about what it’s like when we get to the high school. I looked all over for Sevy, pero… he said he was at the gym.”
“That’s wonderful corazoncita. Next year you will have many new things to learn.”
“Yah, a lot. But cuz a you, Mamá, I think I will stay away from Physics, that shit makes you crazy!”
Angel smiled and looked down. “Mija, I hope you don’t swear like that outside this house.”
“No Mamá.”
“Let’s eat!” called Severino from the kitchen. Their routine was to serve up their own plates in the kitchen and then sit down together for every dinner. As their lives each became busier, it was the one time they had to be a family. Angel said a blessing and they all tore into the tortillas and dishes that Sevy had made from scratch. He was now working part time at El Grullense just down the road and he had learned from the old timers and the old patrona how to make the real food. It was fortunate timing in that it coincided with Angel’s complete inability to function in the kitchen, as her attention was always drifting elsewhere. Her children were very concerned and had talked to Miguel and others about it. But they mainly just accepted it and supported her, hoping it would lead to something. Sevy was the most frightened, wondering if it was some early stage of insanity. But he kept his fears from Lolita and assured her that Mamá was okay. He was old enough to handle the household and whatever Angel would not or could not do, he was there, keeping their world stable and calm.
“Oh yah. Mamá,” broke in Sevy while they all ate with gusto. “You got a Amazon box. I put it in your room.” Angel’s eyes widened with excitement, as she stood up, nearly knocking the table over and ran to her room to retrieve the box. As she returned to the dining room with the box, she set it aside, suddenly realizing that she was acting childish and her two children looked disturbed by it.
“Sorry, my darlings,” Angel exhaled as she sat back in her chair. While she sat and finished the delicious meal and caught up with her children, the package remained in her peripheral vision and she longed to get her hands on it and tear it open to examine it’s contents.
That day, two years earlier, when Angel peered into the physics lecture, she stayed a little late after work to use the computer, searching for the professor with the waving arms, who seemed to so completely captivate his students, as they sat like dry sponges that were suddenly being drenched with water. It only took her several minutes to find him, as the Stanford website had pictures of all the faculty members. Leroy Sussman. Professor of physics, Nobel prize winner. She had heard of that but wasn’t exactly sure what it meant, only that it was something special. It was on that very same day that Angel discovered something called YouTube. That was also very nearly the day that Sevy’s computer was essentially commandeered for the greater good of humanity.
Angel was a seemingly unlikely, unwitting recipient of a special assignment. An assignment that quickly became an obsession, one that she could not explain. There was suddenly a drive, a yearning that was beyond her control. If not for her children, she would have lost all perspective on life, in her quest to learn deep truths about nature. It began with YouTube. Angel watched everything she could find, as YouTube seemed to magically know what she was looking for next. She spent hours, days, weekends, then entire vacations binging on all available lectures by Feynman, Sussman, and so many others. Then she started to phase in more reading, which was so much more difficult but also much more informative. The main types of questions that she kept in the forefront of her mind were simple to ask, not simple to answer. What is light? Why does it have a speed limit? Why does it refract? What is the wave-particle duality?
In the course of pursuing these questions, Angel broadened her understanding and questions well beyond light and sought to understand about matter and its atomic and sub-atomic constituents, and cosmology. One thing that surprised her was the number of questions that remained unanswered or uncertain. It was troubling in a way. There was more understanding of how things worked mathematically, than there was understanding of underlying concepts. She was quite sure that the math part would be an obstacle. She had never taken calculus or even its prerequisites. Many of the books’ contents just looked like gibberish to her, but she still soldiered on and continued to catch up on the state of affairs as best she could.
In her restless pursuit of better understanding, Angel often paused to wonder what was happening to her. It wasn’t fear or even concern, just a question in her mind, like so many others now crowding her thoughts, seeking attention. There was a word that usually came to mind, settling the question, allowing her to move on to other things. Loca. It made her smile.
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