He arrives in this world on March 1st to Eleanor and Colonel John McKay in a wild bang and flash of squalling, bloody, mucous. Eight pounds, three ounces. His father’s so damn proud. Uncle Garry tells him this at every Christmas party over a tumbler of scotch and a plate of poutine. This after clapping him on the shoulder and telling him that rock–climbing is for pansies and that hockey is the godliest sport. Canadians.
He’s John Junior, but no one has ever called him Junior. Not even when he waddled about on stumpy, fat legs, pulling skirts and shedding his clothes and diaper and – god – had he been really this much of an exhibitionist? Regardless, he was John and that was it.
His father is Colonel John McKay, Royal Canadian Air Force. Colonel–father has a square jaw and a crooked smile when mother is not looking. He hides a stash of candy in the garage for John when mother is away and they go hiking together through the badlands behind the ranch. It’s rocky and dry and dangerous and John loves it almost as much as he loves his dad.
Mother is Eleanor Ann McKay and she smells like lilacs. John thinks her pearls are silly but he presses his chubby face against her neck anyway, the round nacre making red imprints on his face. She wears hideous floral dresses like the other base ladies and bakes the best cookies in the whole of the North American continent. John hides in her closet when he’s scared and she’s gone away. Later, she always finds him and rocks him to sleep, no matter that he’s five or ten or fifteen.
He’s smart. John has no idea how much so until he’s in the fifth grade and he’s telling all the other kids that he’s the reincarnation of Ghengis Khan and building a model of the first A–bomb out of tongue depressors, complete with red beads for the detonating charges and a shiny altimeter colored with gray crayon. When asked Johnny, Johnny, why did you do something like this, my god, what were you thinking – because they only call him Johnny if they’re scared – he tells them it’s only designed to have a ten’kiloton blast radius after all. The therapist asks him if he thinks that it will actually blow up and he laughs so hard he’s crying and scared and his mom holds him in her lap. It’s made out of tongue depressors and the man in the suit is obviously from the government and John just wants to go home.
That stupid tongue depressor bomb is the best damn thing that’s ever happened to him and he knows it — ruefully, gleefully. There are tests and evaluations and books and then cool classes at the university with really big kids. He still goes to his middle school half time because Colonel John McKay has read all those child–rearing books and damn it if he’s going to let his only son grow into a weirdo. He’s going to go through the same socializing rituals as every other kid and he will get the education his brilliant mind deserves, thank you very much, ma’am, but he’s my son after all. So John gets to go to the local university and the big kids buy him soda with their nifty cash accounts while he helps them with their homework.
Adolescence is the most painful thing he’s been through and – god – he’ll be glad when it’s over. Colonel–father can’t seem to stop laughing and John gets mad, but he can’t stay pissed when his dad stops to teach him how to shave and talk to girls. He’s blushing non–stop when he notices that mother has switched over to a detergent with extra protein dissolvent and he won’t look her in the eye for a week. Good thing too, because the shared smiles between his parents would have made him dig a reinforced–steel bunker in the backyard to wait out the remainder of his embarrassment.
In high school, it’s well–known that he’s racked up enough credits to officially graduate from both university and high school this year. That doesn’t stop John from hanging out with the math decathlon team and joining the tennis club. Sure, it’s a sissy sport until he nails Brendan Edwards in the forehead with the best lob of his life and it’s so worth the grounding because when he finally emerges, Jenny Sumners kisses him in the shadow of the gymnasium.
They go steady for a month — until prom is over — before she leaves him in the dust and his dad takes him flying to get his mind off his broken heart. Call him Romeo, but flying is way more awesome than Jenny any day, but definitely not more awesome than kissing. John spends university — real university with the whole graduate study, Ph.D track thing — obsessed with aeronautics and weapons engineering. It’s Boston of course, because that’s where MIT is after all. Housing is even more bewildering than thermodynamics or fluid mechanics and John ends up with an apartment full of geeky, MIT grad students who smell bad and are much older than him. John misses friends his own age and ends up in and out of dissatisfying relationships with undergraduate girls who want to either be engineers or psychologists. John’s gratified that they find the genius thing attractive — and he secretly celebrates that he’s no longer a virgin — but can’t they just have fun?
With the master’s dissertation over and the certificate in his hands, John decides that engineering is really not his field at all and sleeps for two days straight. Later — maybe three days after he’s eaten and slept and is getting antsy with inactivity — John stumbles on the astro–freaks in the physics department and he falls in love all over again. He should definitely change his name to Romeo. A whole lot of fuss later and John is starting over again with the incoming astrophysics class. He’s almost giddy with relief and immediately goes out to buy himself the best telescope he can afford with his puny stipend and sits on the roof of his apartment all–night getting a cold and learning the secrets of the universe.
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