A Midsummer's Equation

THIRTY-SIX

The alarm on Kyohei’s phone rang. He checked the time and turned it off. Six thirty. He looked at his open notebook lying on the floor next to him. He hadn’t gotten anywhere with his Japanese homework, just written out a few kanji he had to learn and that was it. Yukawa was helping him with math, but the rest was up to him. He had given it a halfhearted attempt, but it was impossible to focus. His hand kept reaching for the game controller. He had managed to resist that urge, but he made the mistake of turning on the TV for some background noise and got sucked into watching an anime. It wasn’t even one he liked, but he watched the whole thing, all thirty minutes. Finally he switched the TV back off, but he still didn’t feel like studying. He just sat there, waiting for the alarm to ring.

Kyohei left the room and went down to the first floor. He checked the lobby on his way to the dining room and saw Yukawa standing with his arms crossed, staring at the painting of the ocean on the wall.

“Still looking at that painting, Professor?”

“I was just wondering when it was hung here.”

Kyohei shrugged. “It’s been there forever, I think. I’m pretty sure I remember it from when I came two years ago.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Yukawa said with a chuckle and checked his watch. “Shall we?”

Narumi was just laying out Yukawa’s dinner in the dining room. It was seafood, as usual. She had placed a tray for Kyohei across the table. Tonight’s meal for the family was meatloaf.

“Looks delicious as always,” Yukawa commented as he sat down.

“I’m sorry, I know there’s not much variety.”

“Not at all. There’s a different fish every day. It’s given me a new appreciation for seafood.”

“Oh yeah,” Kyohei suddenly said. “I wanted to ask you, Narumi. I went swimming today and I saw this really cool fish. It was tiny, and bright blue.”

“Bright blue? About yea big?” She held her fingertips roughly two centimeters apart.

“That’s right.” Kyohei nodded. “It looked like a tropical fish it was so bright.”

“Sounds like a damselfish,” she said.

“A damsel? Like a damsel in distress? I always pictured them in white dresses, not blue.”

Narumi laughed. “Well, this one is officially called the neon damselfish. We get them a lot around here. It’s usually the first really impressive thing people see when they come here to try diving or snorkeling. I remember when I saw my first one. I thought it looked like a swimming jewel.”

“Yeah, I tried to catch it, but it was too fast.”

“I’d like to see the person who could catch one of those with his bare hands. You know, in the winter they turn black.”

“That’s too bad. But not like it really matters. I wouldn’t go swimming in the winter.”

Kyohei turned to his plate and picked up his fork and knife. The surface of the meatloaf was nicely browned, and when he cut it with his knife, sauce and juices oozed out along with a gush of steam.

“Your dinner doesn’t look too bad either,” Yukawa commented.

“Trade you for a piece of sashimi,” Kyohei said.

“It’s not a bad offer. Let me think on it. While you’re here—” Yukawa picked up his chopsticks and turned to Narumi. “I had a question for you.”

“Yes?” she said, straightening her back a little.

“That painting in the lobby. Do you know who the painter was?”

Narumi took a deep breath. She shook her head. “No. Why?”

“I was just curious. I spoke with Kyohei before about it, and we were wondering where it had been painted. The ocean doesn’t look like that from around the inn.”

Narumi brushed her hair back behind her ears and wrinkled her forehead in thought. “I don’t know. It’s been here for a long time. I guess I never really paid much attention to it.”

“A long time? From before you moved here, then?”

“Yes. I think Dad said that someone gave it to Grandpa. I don’t think he knows who painted it, either.”

Narumi picked up the long-handled lighter from the tray and went to light the small burner in front of Yukawa.

“Don’t bother, I’ll get it myself,” Yukawa said. “You can just leave the lighter there.”

Narumi looked a little surprised by this, but she put it back. “Enjoy your meal,” she said, preparing to leave.

“Actually, I know where that view is from,” Yukawa said to her turned back. “That’s the ocean from East Hari. I went and checked it out today.”

Narumi stopped in her tracks, her entire body motionless. Then her head turned back around, slowly, like a robot badly in need of oil.

“Oh?” she said weakly, an unnatural smile on her face. “East Hari?”

“You really didn’t know?” Yukawa asked.

“Like I said, I never really thought about it.”

“I didn’t think you’d need to think about it, being as familiar as you are with the sea around here. Enough to make your own Web site.”

“Well, I don’t go to East Hari much.”

“Really? I thought you had something on your blog about the views from there.”

Narumi’s eyes flared. “I wrote nothing of the sort,” she said sharply.

Yukawa chuckled. “It’s nothing to get angry about.”

“Who’s angry?”

“Well, if you didn’t write that on your blog, I must’ve been mistaken. I should apologize.”

“No need to apologize. Was there anything else?”

“No, I’m fine,” Yukawa said, pouring beer into his glass.

“Enjoy,” Narumi said and left, her shoulders a little slumped.

“So you really found the spot?” Kyohei asked Yukawa. “You know where the painting was painted?”

“More or less,” Yukawa said, pouring some soy sauce into a little saucer in front of him. He grabbed a clump of wasabi in his chopsticks and began dissolving it into the soy sauce. His motions were clinical, a scientist stirring a solution in a petri dish.

“You went all the way out there just to check the view? It bothered you that much?”

“It didn’t bother me. It excited my curiosity. And I believe there is no greater sin than to leave one’s curiosity unsatisfied. Curiosity is the fuel that powers the engine of human advancement.”

Kyohei nodded, wondering why the physicist always made a big deal out of every little observation.

Yukawa picked up the lighter on his dining tray. He pressed on the switch and with a click, a thin tongue of flame extended from the end. Kyohei had a lighter just like it back home. They bought it for barbecues, except they had only actually used it once. His parents were usually too busy for barbecues.

Yukawa used it to light the small cylinder of waxy fuel inside the burner on his table.

“You know what the container on this burner is made out of?” Yukawa asked.

There was a white bowl-shaped saucer sitting on the burner. Kyohei stared at it and said, “It looks like it’s made out of folded paper.”

“That’s right, it is paper. They call these containers paper pots. But don’t you think it’s strange that the paper doesn’t burn?”

“It’s probably coated with something, right?”

Yukawa used his fingers to tear a small piece off of the edge of the paper pot, then picked the piece up with his chopsticks and lit the lighter in his other hand. When the flame touched the piece, it didn’t burst into flame, but instead slowly shriveled into black ash. Yukawa didn’t stop until it looked like his chopsticks were going to catch on fire.

“Regular paper would have burned up the moment the flame touched it. So yes, it has some flame-retardant coating on it. But it wasn’t impervious to the fire, either, which makes me question your theory.”

Kyohei put down his fork and knife and came around to Yukawa’s side of the table.

“So why doesn’t it burn?”

“Look inside the paper pot. There’s veggies, and fish, yes, but there’s also a little soup. Soup is water. Do you know what temperature water boils at? They teach that in fifth grade, don’t they?”

“Yeah, sure. A hundred degrees Celsius. We did an experiment on that last year.”

“I’m guessing you put water inside a flask, heated it, and checked the temperature?”

“Yeah. When it got close to a hundred, the water started to bubble.”

“And what happened to the temperature afterward? Did it keep going up?”

Kyohei shook his head. “No, it just stopped.”

“Correct. At one hundred degrees Celsius, water becomes a gas. Conversely, as long as water remains a liquid, it can’t get any hotter. In a similar fashion, as long as there is soup inside this paper pot, you can heat up the bottom as much as you want and it will never burn. That’s because paper burns at around 230 degrees Celsius.”

“I get it,” Kyohei said, folding his arms across the chest and staring at the burner.

“Time for our next experiment.”

Yukawa moved his beer glass and picked up the round paper coaster from underneath it.

“What would happen if I put this on top of the fuel cylinder in the burner?”

Kyohei looked between the coaster and Yukawa’s face. It felt like a trick question. Hesitantly, he said, “It’ll burn?”

“Probably, yes.”

Kyohei rolled his eyes. “Where’s the experiment in that?”

“Patience. How about this?”

Yukawa picked up a pot sitting next to him on the table and poured some water onto the coaster until it was drenched. Some of the water dripped on the tatami mat below the table, but the physicist didn’t seem to care.

“Now what would happen if I put this on the cylinder?”

Kyohei thought for a moment. This time, the problem didn’t seem so straightforward. “I know,” he said. “It would burn, but not right away.”

“Why not?”

“Because the paper has water in it. So it won’t burn until the water’s completely gone. After the water dries up, it’ll catch on fire.”

“I see,” Yukawa said, his face expressionless. “Is that your final answer?”

Kyohei nodded. “Final answer.”

“Right,” Yukawa said, throwing the drenched coaster on top of the burning fuel. The coaster fit perfectly over the foil packaging around the cylinder, like a lid on a box.

Kyohei stared at the coaster. The middle was starting to get darker. He expected flames to burst up any moment, but after a while, he noticed that nothing had changed.

Yukawa took the coaster off of the fuel cylinder. The fire had gone out. “Hey,” Kyohei said, giving the physicist a quizzical look.

“The important detail here is the container around the fuel. Whether you’re a fuel cube or a piece of paper, you need oxygen to burn. But when I put the coaster on the fuel container, like a lid, oxygen could no longer get into the fire. Now, if the coaster weren’t wet, it probably would’ve burned before the fire went out, and oxygen would’ve come back in. However, because it was wet, it didn’t burn right away, like you theorized. And wet paper is much better than dry paper at blocking the passage of air.”

Yukawa picked the lighter back up and relit his fuel cube. Again, he put the wet coaster on top of it. He snatched it off a moment later, but the fire had already gone out.

“It’s like magic,” Kyohei said.

“Haven’t you ever learned that when oil in a frying pan catches on fire, you shouldn’t pour water on it? The best thing to do is to throw a wet towel over it and cut off the supply of oxygen. Things need oxygen to burn, and without oxygen, fires go out. And if there’s some oxygen, but not a lot, it will burn incompletely.”

“Like what we were talking about today in the car?”

“That’s right,” Yukawa said, lighting the fuel block for third time. “Burning fuel without sufficient oxygen in the air creates carbon monoxide.”

Kyohei thought back to their ride in the van, wondering why his uncle and aunt had looked so put out.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” Yukawa asked. “Your meatloaf’s getting cold.”