Anomaly Read Free

at odds with the instantaneous impression his young mind had of light, and his interest in astronomy grew from there. Young Teller would try to see how fast light was when he switched on his bedside lamp, or when he shone a laser pointer in the bathroom mirror, try as he may, he was never quick enough to see it move.
    Teller's bedroom walls were covered with posters of astronauts floating in space or walking on the moon, images of galaxies and nebulae. As a teen, he saved up and bought his own telescope. It was more suited to bird watching than staring at the night sky, but he could make out the faint smudge that marked the Andromeda galaxy, and he could see the blurred gold and blue sparkle of the space station as it orbited the Earth. For Teller, it was a view like that of the Hubble Space Telescope.
    College, though, seemed to bring out the worst in Teller. Astronomy was no longer fun. With time on his hands, his interests wandered. After his first year he switched to major in biology. His father thought he was on drugs, but it was a girl that swayed his thinking. Lisa was bright and bubbly. The world of Charles Darwin, the voyage of the Beagle, the realization of Natural Selection – Lisa made all these subjects come alive for him. They had dreams. They would travel the world together, fight to protect the rain-forests of South America, journey to Indonesia to raise orangutans, move on to Thailand to protect tigers and elephants in the wild, before heading to Australia to protest against Japanese whaling in the southern ocean. Then, one day, Lisa didn't show up for class, she missed her lectures.
    Lisa had driven to Virginia to visit her folks over a long weekend, but she hadn't returned. It took the local police three agonizing days to find her. When they dragged her car from a lake barely four miles from her home they found her body trapped inside, still wearing a seatbelt. It had rained that weekend. Perhaps she was driving too fast, perhaps the road was slick, perhaps she'd been distracted as she approached the corner, perhaps she had swerved to avoid a stray dog or a deer. Teller would never know.
    Teller was devastated.
    He drove to the spot where she'd lost control and was shocked to see how little there was revealing the tragedy. There weren't any obvious skid marks. She'd missed the safety barrier leading into the corner by less than a foot. A fraction of a second had made the difference between life and death. The lowlying shrubs and trees along the bank had some bark scraped off them and a couple of broken twigs, but nothing more than that. There was a slight indentation where the wheels had crossed the shoulder of the road, just a couple of errant tire tracks in the soft clay. The drop to the water was no more than fifteen feet, but the lake was deep. The police said her car would have gone under in seconds. They were kind and professional. They told him there was a mark on the side of her head where she'd hit the pillar of the door as the car twisted on impact with the water. This, they said, would have knocked her unconscious. She wouldn't have felt anything, no pain, no fear.
    Teller struggled with the senseless loss. The swiftness with which a beautiful life had been lost left him in shock. He blamed himself. He could have gone with her, he should have gone with her. He should have been driving. Things would have been different, he was sure of it. But there were no second chances in life, no re-runs, and all Teller had left was a sense of guilt and loss.
    Teller dropped out of college. He worked as a waiter for a few months, and tried to find solace in a bottle but that only made his despair worse. It was his sister who came to the rescue. She was a preschool teacher. She dragged him along on a couple of field trips to help out with the kids. Teller was surprised by how much he enjoyed himself. The kids were little horrors, but that didn't seem to matter. He found a sense of joy in their inquiring