all his hair, and it was still coal black, and his dark eyes twinkled above
the paper surgical mask he was wearing.
He wouldn't let me hug him. "Whoa, Nelly, stay back," he said. "You're
sure a sight for sore eyes, honey, but I don't want you catching this
sonofabitch of a bug."
Dad escorted me back to the TB ward and introduced me to all of his
friends. "Believe it or not, ol' Rex Walls did produce something worth
bragging about, and here she is," he told them. Then he started coughing.
"Dad, are you going to be okay?" I asked.
"Ain't none of us getting out of this alive, honey," Dad said. It was an
expression he used a lot, and now he seemed to find a special satisfaction
in it.
Dad led me over to his cot. A neat pile of books was stacked next to it.
He said his bout with TB had set him to pondering about mortality and
the nature of the cosmos. He'd been stone-cold sober since entering the
hospital, and reading a lot more about chaos theory, particularly about
the work of Mitchell Feigenbaum, a physicist at Los Alamos who had
made a study of the transition between order and turbulence. Dad said he
was damned if Feigenbaum didn't make a persuasive case that turbulence
was not in fact random but followed a sequential spectrum of varying
frequencies. If every action in the universe that we thought was random
actually conformed to a rational pattern, Dad said, that implied the
existence of a divine creator, and he was beginning to rethink his
atheistic creed. "I'm not saying there's a bearded old geezer named
Yahweh up in the clouds deciding which football team is going to win
the Super Bowl," Dad said. "But if the physics—the quantum physics—
suggests that God exists, I'm more than willing to entertain the notion."
Dad showed me some of the calculations he'd been working on. He saw