A Father’s Day hike in the desert. Not long before the fateful trip to Florida. A piece of gneiss lay on the ground, and Joe picked it up and pointed to the mountains of gneiss that rose beyond the desert floor’s prickly complications of creosote bush, ocotillo and cholla, opuntia, mesquite, paloverde. Joe held out the rock and exclaimed, “The pattern in the peaks is the same as the pattern in the rock, see? That’s called self-similarity, and it’s everywhere in nature.” An odd moment for Jersey: when she looked at the rock and the mountains and did not see what her father saw. The heavy chunk of gneiss that Joe placed in her hand was striated—dark bands running through a lightly flecked matrix (pale rose, tan, gray)—while the mountains, at least at that moment, appeared a mottled mauve. Still, Jersey believed Joe. That is, she supposed that she should see the pattern. She loved Joe. She wanted to please him, and she truly had seen, on other occasions, the phenomenon that he described, and so she nodded.
