Читать книгу Inappropriate Behaviour - Irene Mock - Страница 12

MY FATHER DRIVES FAST. He calls it the desire for conquest. He likes to pit his skills and the machine against the elements. Stones on the road. A car coming from one side. Wet leaves on a rainy night. "If it normally takes an hour to get somewhere and you do it in half the time," he once told me, "you're annihilating both time and space."

This was in October 1962, when everyone worried that the Americans would start a nuclear war in response to Soviet missiles in Cuba, but all I could think about was my parents' likely divorce. My father and I were in his ham radio shack, my chair facing a picture of two apes writing the equation E=mc2. Underneath the apes was the caption Engineers ARE People. As my father's teletype machine clattered away with news signalling we were on the brink of war, I thought of those apes. They looked like mad scientists, scribbling furiously while a group of people stood by laughing, hands cupped over their mouths.