The Boy Who Counted Lightning

"I was born in Boston into a house with two clocks," he said. "My father was a judge and kept court hours; my mother was an emergency-room nurse and kept none. I learned early that a human being can be running down in minutes and wound back up in a few hundred volts, and that my mother did this every shift with a machine the size of a suitcase. When I was nine, I watched her team bring back a man who had been dead on a gurney for ninety seconds—she had his fists in both hands and was counting watts out loud, and the line on the monitor climbed back like a sapling straightening. Nobody in that hallway thought it was a miracle. They thought it was equipment. I thought: someone taught the lightning a trick, and I wanted to meet the teacher.

"My mother's father died in my tenth year despite every machine she had. I decided the trick had a flaw, and that I would find it.

"I was not a lonely child. My brother Oliver was six years younger and followed me like a shadow with a laugh. Nora Bennett lived across the common; her father taught music, and she had the serious, particular kindness of people who practice. And there was Danny Okafor, who has followed me into every trouble I have ever had and is, I believe, the best man I know.

"We were a family that believed in institutions—my father in the law, my mother in the hospital, and I, by seventeen, in the university upriver. Nora saw me off at the station and handed me a wrapped paperback—her father's edition of the poems—and said, 'Read one page a night, so you remember clocks that are not the lab's.' I still have it. My letters to her were full of chemistry. Hers were full of the neighborhood: how Oliver had grown four inches and had learned to sail.

"I was happy in the way you are happy at nineteen, which is to say I mistook appetite for purpose. I wanted the trick. The flaw in it. I wanted to meet the teacher too.

"At the end of my second year I found him, or found his lectern. Professor Ansel Roth."