Escape Velocity
Escape Velocity
Adolescence is a haze of hot summers and wire stripping.
Its circuit boards littering the floor, yelling, tears soaking through her pillowcase. Its paint and grease and peeling at scabs on Jillian’s knuckles as she steals surreptitious glances at Ms. Sylvia, the young, bright-toothed art teacher.
It’s time spent alone, television, and the lack of ability to execute the kind of interpersonal synergy from which friendships emerge.
She gets braces to help with her rabbit-teeth situation, but Jillian’s inherited, unruly hair continues to elude her. Neither of these things bother her much though, because Jillian would rather not look sexy.
When she’s in ninth grade, Jillian places second in the science fair with a submission she whipped up in just three days- ok, cobbled together in three days from several unfinished contraptions, artfully selected from her bedroom graveyard of hobby-projects.
[Holtzmann would forever maintain that envisioning the way in which a shonky alarm system, a pressure sensitive safe, some lasers, bear traps, and sundry bits and bobs could do the hanky-panky to produce a booby-trap of Indiana Jones proportions (tee-hee, booby-trap!) was a mad flash of genius. Genius which should have placed higher than Bobby Calvin’s better planned (if she’s honest), but boring winning entry.]
The prize is a cheque for $150, but the glowing praise Jillian receives from her parents is even better. They tell her she can choose whatever she wants for dinner that night, and she picks creamy pasta with mushrooms, scooping a big wallop of it into her bowl.
Jillian’s heart sinks all the way down to her toes as she watches the pride wash out of her mother’s face upon opening her report card that same week, to see the big black ‘C’ where her anticipated stellar science grade should have been.
“Her primary report wasn’t submitted in time,” Mr. Reynolds informs her mother, his voice low and smooth, like it’s become worn from keeping large groups of teenagers in line for years and can no longer be compelled to energetic conversation.
“Jillian is a bright girl- and to be honest, I think she has unlimited potential, say, in a field like engineering or maybe chemistry if only she applied herself. But unfortunately, Mrs. Holtzmann, I cannot mark work that isn’t there.”
After her encounter with Patsy in the grassy field, Jillian would return to the spot every few days, and then only every few months before eventually stopping. She found she couldn't count on her canine friend to appear with any kind of predictability- and now she doesn’t feel the steady, comforting presence of the ghostly dog, except on rare occasions. She'll be walking late at night sometimes, hopeful that her leather jacket will make her either invisible or intimidating enough to ward off trouble- and it’s then that she’ll begin to feel the atmosphere bubble around her, and sense a protective, Doberman-shaped spirit flanking her along the still pavement.
The mystery of how any of this is possible remains exactly that, and even after squeezing out as much knowledge about the paranormal as she can, from anywhere she can, Jillian is stumped. The library shelves she ransacked contained little in the way of useful information, and it turns out that few researchers consider the scientific study of ghosts worthwhile.
When Amelia Holtzmann dies two weeks after Jillian’s seventeenth birthday, she curls up in the cool, soft sheets of her Mom’s bed and hopes to desperately that what happened with Patsy could happen now, too. Hopes to feel a voice hum in her ear or for warm arms to wrap themselves around her shoulder.
They don’t.
There are tapes that sink towards the bottom of Jillian’s collection, and go untouched for years. She can’t dance to them anymore, and just looking at the familiar, loopy hand some of the titles are written in makes her insides feel hollow.
College is a welcome and hotly anticipated reprieve. It’s not her dream school, but it doesn’t matter, because everything is new and exciting. She’s away from home, from Richard Holtzmann, from the tedium of routine, she’s even away from Bobby fucking Calvin [who went to MIT].
Jillian can't say with absolute certainty what she wants to do with the rest of her life, but that doesn’t matter either, because the world is fascinating and boundless.
She does know that she's great at science, and loves using her hands- engineering has always been the obvious choice [although she briefly contemplated art school]. Jillian wants to interact with the jigsaw-puzzle universe in a tangible way, and it's this thought- of building her own toys designed to get all up in its mysterious face- that truly excites her.
Her time a blurs into a miasma of faces and smells and drinks and late nights. College is frenzy of invention, but not in the same sense as the frenzy from which her 3:00 AM electronic brainchildren used to spring (now all packed in their brown banana boxes, resting along the wall of her dorm).
It’s different now, because Jillian Holtzmann thinks she’s inventing herself.
She’s thudded along on academic probation for a whole year when an associate dean wearing shiny silver spectacles waves her hand dismissively, and Jillian slinks from her office.
When she leaves college without any degree to show for it, Jillian’s mind feels like a boulder that sinks her body to the bottom of a well. Except the bottom of the well is the faded red couch in her half-brother’s basement, and she doesn’t want to get off of it. She barely knows Josh- he’s older, married and a new father to a baby boy, but he lets her stay in his home out of sentiment for their shared, dead mother.
Jillian is happy about the lack of windows in the basement because their absence allows no daylight to enter the dank space. She sleeps a lot, and she works an evening telemarketing shift during which she telephones people who probably have something better to do than listen to her half-hearted attempts to sell them car insurance. She can't bring herself to look at, let alone touch any of her tools, so they sit unpacked along with any other possessions that remind her of herself too much. Everything else gets strewn across the floor.
Her days involve more hours than she wants to think about spent consuming beer and cold pizza in front of the artificial glare of an old Dell PC. [Jillian is forced to lay off the pizza when her sweatpants become uncomfortably tight, as the prospect of having to leave the solace of the couch to acquire new clothing, and grunt acknowledgement at helpful shop assistants is more unappealing than being pizza-less].
Looking over the messy landscape of her life in confusion, Jillian tries not to think about what comes next.
Everything hurts right now, the blood flows thick and slow through her limbs, and her eyes force themselves shut.
Her fingers are stiff from the early Saturday chill when Jillian slips furtively into the upstairs laundry to wrest her odd mix of socks and graphic tees from the dryer, and stops in her tracks upon seeing a bun of tightly knotted red hair poking out of the washing cupboard.
Jillian feels awkward intruding in an almost-stranger’s house, and knows that Rachel, Josh’s wife, is uncomfortable with her presence. This anxiety, thrown in with the fact that she’s taken maybe one shower this week and desperately needs to change her underwear for hygiene’s sake, causes her to abort her laundry mission. It can wait.
But before a hasty retreat can be executed, Rachel’s rifling ceases, and she emerges from the cupboard, new light-bulb in hand.
“Good Morning” she nods to Jillian, "I didn't think you'd be in here so early."
"Hi Rachel"
As Jillian gathers her clothes from the dryer, might as well now, Rachel lingers and makes small talk- seemingly more to herself than to her sheepish house guest: something about Josh’s promotion, their favourite football team, her craft table. It's an uneasy kind of monologue.
As her shiny ballet flats clack over to the doorway, Rachel stops, hovers in the frame, and she turns around to look at Jillian again. Her lips have un-pursed themselves, and in the corners of her eyes, the fine suggestions of crow’s feet relax a little. It’s not an expression that she's seen from her before.
“You know Jillian…,” she begins, and pauses, as though she’s still not sure whether to say whatever comes next, and there’s a note in her voice which prompts Jillian to find the bundle of laundry in her hands intensely fascinating.
“I, uh… Now, I don’t know what you’re going through, and I don’t want to interfere, but you’re living in my basement and you barely seem to leave it. So I think…”
Jillian pretends that there’s something wrong with a zipper on one of her trouser legs.
“I went through a hard time a few years ago- I’d just moved to a new city and was having trouble at work,” Rachel continues, and even though her face has softened, her voice hasn't.
“I’d call my uncle every night, and tell him about all the things that were happening that I couldn’t change. He was good at listening, but I could tell he got frustrated sometimes. There was this story he told me, one of those times, and it really made me think.”
Rachel tells the story, and Jillian listens.
A Farmer and His Dog
A wise old farmer sits on his front porch with his dog beside him, and the dog is whining. When the farmer’s young neighbour walks past the house, she hears the racket and asks “why is your dog yelping like that?”
“He’s sittin' on a nail”, the farmer replies.
“Well, why doesn’t he get off the nail then?”
The farmer sips slowly at his cup of tea, “Doesn’t hurt enough yet.”
When Rachel leaves to make breakfast, Jillian is still fiddling with the zipper, which she’s now broken for real, and she’s putting an Olympian effort into keeping her face neutral.
It’s some weeks later, when Josh yells down the basement stairs that there’s a phone-call she needs to take, and the professionally sympathetic voice emitted from the receiver brings news of Richard Holtzmann’s fatal heart attack, that Jillian gets off the couch, and stays off. She tries very hard not to let the relief that pulses through the sadness make her feel like a terrible person.
Two dead parents mean Jillian has money for the first time in her life.
It’s not a lot of money. There was a reason her mother had taken up every shift she could in those last few years, coming home with bags under her eyes and watching mindless television, drifting off to sleep with wine glass still in hand. Thinking about those evenings calls to mind a picture Jillian saw once of images hidden at the bottoms of Greek wine receptacles, of soldiers riding dolphins over the wine dark sea. She hopes her mother’s red-wine dreams were like that.
It’s not a lot of money, but at twenty one years old it takes Jillian to Thailand. The dinosaur sites of Phu Wiang are interesting. Jillian discovers she likes cold noodles, and that Australian backpackers are rowdy. She feels anonymous, staying away from the nightlife party circuit which speeds like an ant mine through the streets of Bangkok. Plumes of white smoke hit her face as she stares at the Bodhisattvas.
The massive idols don’t stare back at her like she’d expected them to, they possess none of the coyness for which the Mona Lisa is famed; they stare out.
It’s not a lot of money, but when she returns to the States, Jillian can finally move her things out of Josh's basement.
Some months on, she sits picking at the ripped edge of her shirt on a sleek grey sofa in the waiting room of a doctors’ office. Following her instincts pays off, and the inexpressive man she’d waited to speak to hands her a prescription in about thirty minutes.
“Pretty textbook,” he says, seemingly ignorant of the way those words transform her from pumpkin to chariot on the spot,
“But girls with ADHD, and ‘gifted’ girls in particular, often go under the radar.”
The sky feels like it’s opening up in a whole new way, after she exits the pharmacy that afternoon, swallows her first Ritalin IR tablet, and begins to feel like Apollo- grasping the reins of her thoughts as they rise, and riding them across their arcs to where they set.
Holy fuck.
Thought gets followed by action, and it is so ridiculously simple that she doesn't know whether to laugh, cry, or both, and so she does neither.
Jillian thinks she’ll probably be able to work now. And boy, is Jillian Holtzmann ready to work.
After some bureaucratic frippery, she’s allowed to return to college.
It’s not nearly so easy, not nearly so instant as it seemed at first. The meds take some tinkering with, her habits still suck, and working, Jillian discovers, is hard. So yes, harnessing her attention still mostly feels like putting a cardigan on an octopus [like getting hit in the face over and over at a probably a pointless activity]- but, slowly, surely, Jillian starts to breathe evenly.
Jillian is messing about in a student-access lab after hours one evening, working on her special project. She’s not enrolled in the talented student stream that the project is meant for, but I’m gonna do it anyway.
Her actual classes are going great (meaning that she's showing up semi-consistently and has passed the majority of them), so why the hell not?
She’s so immersed in hammering out plans for her machine, that she doesn’t pick up on the presence of the intimidating, Amazon-tall woman in the lab with her until she’s standing right over Jillian’s table, reading all her measurements and commenting: “I think that's larger than it needs to be.”
“Oh,” Jillian assures her, so wrapped up in her project that the intrusion doesn’t even seem weird,
“That’s because I’m compensating for the excess heat generated by the adjacent chamber.”
Looking at the sketch to which Jillian directs her attention by using a half-eaten pringle as a pointer, the woman entertains a moment of mild, somehow thoughtful surprise.
“In that case, I think you’ll need make some adjustments here, and here.”
They discuss the finer points of Jillian’s design late into the night, until a yawn finally sneaks up on her before she can contain it. The time has flown by, and now the woman- who introduced herself as Dr. Rebecca Gorin- looks up at the clock on the wall, and remarks,
“Well, I’d better be getting home, Jillian. Beastie will be wondering where I’ve gotten to.”
Jillian she wishes Dr. Gorin would stay just a little longer. She’s hung on to every word that's left this woman’s mouth, and it's been so fantastic to talk about her ideas with someone who wants to listen.
“We’ll meet back here at the same time next Thursday to go over the additional components we talked about. Dr. Limes will be pleased. As you know, she's overseeing the Talented Student Projects again this year, and I don’t think she’s seen one so promising for some time. ”
Oh.
It occurs to Jillian, that maybe she should inform Dr. Gorin that she’s not actually enrolled in the program- that she couldn't be, because apparently on the day the Flying Spaghetti Monster [praise his Noodliness] was dishing out prefrontal cortex, she’d done something to piss him off.
It occurs to her to ask who Beastie is, and what Dr. Gorin is doing here in the first place. Does she routinely haunt the labs at night, sneaking up upon random unsuspecting students and critiquing their work?
But before she can get her mouth moving in time with her brain to vocalise any of these thoughts, Dr. Gorin has exited Jillian’s evening just as swiftly as she’d entered it.
The universe is fascinating and boundless and mysterious, but of this, Jillian Holtzmann is certain:
Absolutely nothing within it will be capable of preventing her from being in that lab at 6:00 PM sharp next Thursday.