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CHAOS THEORY
TEN-YEAR-OLD OLLY AND his dad are at the breakfast bar in their old penthouse
apartment in New York City. It’s Christmastime, so maybe it’s snowing outside, or maybe
it just stopped snowing. This is a memory, so the details are a bit uncertain.
His dad has made fresh hot chocolate. He’s a connoisseur and prides himself on
making it from scratch. He melts actual bars of baking chocolate and uses whole “one
hundred percent of the fat” milk. He takes Olly’s favorite mug, pours in a layer of
chocolate and adds six ounces of hot milk heated to almost boiling on the stove—never in
the microwave. Olly stirs the milk and chocolate together while his dad gets the whipped
cream, also freshly made, from the fridge. The cream is just lightly sweetened, the kind of
sweet that makes you want more. He spoons one dollop, maybe two into Olly’s mug.
Olly raises his cup and blows on the already melting whipped cream. It slides across the
surface like a miniature iceberg. He eyes his dad over the top of the mug, trying to gauge
what kind of mood he’s in.
Lately the moods have been bad, worse than normal.
“Newton was wrong,” his dad says now. “The universe is not deterministic.”
Olly kicks his legs. He loves when his dad talks to him like this, “mano a mano,” like
he’s a grown-up, even though he doesn’t always understand what he’s saying. They’d been
having more of these conversations since his dad’s suspension from work.
“What does that mean?” Olly asks.
His dad always waits for Olly to ask before explaining anything.
“It means one thing doesn’t always lead to another,” he says, and takes a slurp of hot
chocolate. Somehow his dad never blows on the hot liquid first. He just dives right in. “It
means you can do every goddamn thing right, and your life can still turn to shit.”
Olly holds his sip of hot chocolate in his mouth and stares at his mug.
A few weeks ago Olly’s mom had explained that his dad was going to be home for a
while until things were fixed at his work. She wouldn’t say what was wrong, but Olly had
overheard words like “fraud” and “investigation.” He wasn’t quite sure what any of it
meant, only that his dad seemed to love Olly and Kara and his mom a little less than he
did before. And the less he seemed to love them, the more they tried to become more
lovable.
The phone rings and his dad strides over to it.
Olly swallows his mouthful of hot chocolate and listens.
At first his dad uses his work voice, the one that’s angry and relaxed at the same time.
Eventually, though, his voice just turns to angry. “You’re firing me? You just said those
assholes were clearing me.”