PORTRAIT OF THE GENIUS AS A YOUNG MAN

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Paul T. Gettelman, the most unheralded scientist of the previous century, was twenty-four when he first suggested the use of a stable emulsion of oil and egg yolk as a propellant for all vehicles and conveyances, whether “bicycles on the ground, airplanes in the air, or one day even ships streaking through the distant reaches of space.” Gettelman made the same suggestion later that year, and the next year, and the year after that, mostly just to Jeff, his officemate at the accounting firm where he worked. Eventually Jeff left the company and was replaced by a woman named Saorise, who stayed for only six months before moving to California to front a country-rock band that was, before the end of the year, filling arenas. That side of the office sat vacant for a little while, and then Ernie was relocated from down the hall. Ernie had experience not listening to people. He had lived at home until he was forty-one and then moved in with his boyfriend, who bossed him around constantly, and so he was resolute in ignoring Paul for weeks stretching into months, but around the holidays the chatter started to seep through, and Ernie found himself unable to shut out thoughts of his college chemistry classes. He had been a blazingly good student. He stopped working through lunch and started taking long breaks, scribbling on legal pads, and one day the scribbles came into sharp focus. He had realized Paul’s idea. He stopped on the way back from lunch at a hardware store, bought a pipe wrench, stove in Paul’s skull, dragged the body behind the building, rolled it up in a carpet, loaded the carpet into a truck, drove the truck to a lake, pushed the rolled-up carpet into the water, and drove back to the office. Within ten years he was a billionaire from the purloined technology. His boyfriend bought the Mendoza Estate and several top-flight sports cars, all of which were powered by a stable emulsion of egg yolk and oil. Paul blinked. He was not rolled up in a carpet in the lake. He was sitting across the office from Jeff, still twenty-four, working up the courage to lay out his plans for superfuel.