by Laurel Brett
I couldn’t let her disappear. “How about later?”
“Nope. No can do.”
“Don’t I get to meet this Terry?”
“Are you kidding? That would be an awful idea. I don’t think you two would hit it off at all. And you might lecture him about me. That would be so embarrassing.”
I was thinking more of taking him aside and giving him a piece of my mind. “You’re underage.”
“That’s exactly why I don’t want you two to meet—because you think crap like that.”
Changing the subject, I asked, “So all the noise was for this brief hello?”
“I think I could spare another half hour or so.”
I considered the situation; I watched myself walk into the lecture hall and cancel the rest of the class.
We walked back to my office. I sat behind my desk, and she sat, as she had so many times in my imagination, in the chair reserved for students. She eyed the artwork on the walls. I’d hung the van Goghs I’d taken down from my study walls, and I had some photographs of Jane Pinsky’s work. Daphne studied the snapshots as if she’d never seen them before, which of course she hadn’t. Only Galen’s Daphne had.
“Those are cool,” she said. “Who did them?”
“A young painter who goes to Sarah Lawrence and studies with Galen Green. Ever hear of him?”
“Yeah. You mentioned him the day we spent in Times Square. Why are you so interested in him? I don’t know his work.”
“Ever meet him?”
“Well, sure. I always hang out with famous artists. I had lunch with Picasso just yesterday.” She gave me a fishy look.
“Because I saw a portrait that looked just like you. By Galen Green, as a matter of fact.”
“Really? Describe it.”
Sitting together in my little office, I didn’t want to tell her the painting was a nude. I had made us tea using two immersion heaters, coils of metal that warmed water in a mug. The mugs had been a gift from Jerry, and they read Id and Superego. I had broken the Ego mug awhile ago. Figures—the ego is meant to be the synthesis. The water never really got hot enough for great tea, but Daphne was polite enough to not complain. She did use three packets of sugar, though.
“So what does the painting look like?” she repeated.
“It’s abstract, but you can see a girl with auburn hair.”
“Abstract, eh? Bourgeois art. Come the revolution we are going to outlaw all that decadent art.”
I was relieved to see her impish smile that said she was joking. “What about your parents?” I ventured. “How do they feel about you living with Terry?”
“Oh, why do we have to talk about parents? That’s a boring subject.”
No luck there. I remembered that Galen’s Daphne had told me that her parents had been okay with her going to live with Galen. Maybe they were okay with Terry too? But who were these parents? Simulacra, like the Schrödinger girls? Was everything repeated in alternate universes, like each drop of pond water teeming with life under Leeuwenhoek’s microscope?
“I have to go now,” she said.
“Do you want a ride?”
“I think I can make it across campus on my own. I remember exactly which dorm Terry is in, Bliss Hall. I have a good sense of direction. Make sure you go to the demonstration. That’s really what I came to tell you.”
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes, and she’s gone. Daphne was always disappearing.
I decided to follow her. Since I’d parked my car right outside the building, I could easily get to the dorm before she did. Luckily, I was able to find a parking spot that had sight lines to the door of the building where trees would block an easy view of me. After just a few minutes I saw my plucky SDS Daphne walk into the dorm. I wanted to catch a glimpse of her SDS leader. I had seen Galen, and now I wanted to see Terry too.
While I waited I listened to the radio, WOR FM, whose signal just reached New Paltz. It was a beautiful late-September day, and I put my top down and enjoyed listening to “Strawberry Fields.” I decided that I liked it better than “Penny Lane,” though it had officially been designated the B side. Perhaps Caroline was right. Maybe I was becoming unbalanced. Now I was stalking teenage girls. Thank god I didn’t have any binoculars or a camera with a telephoto lens. I could lose my job if anyone caught me spying.
Just then Daphne walked out. I turned off the radio and peered at the guy behind her. He was of average height, slightly stocky, with a dark beard and hair too curly to grow long. He wore a flannel shirt and was neater and more personable-looking than I’d expected. I saw him put his arm around my girl in a companionable way. She leaned into him. He said something to her, and she laughed. With Terry, Daphne, this political, strident girl, gave signs of being happy. After my brief glimpse of the two of them together, they got into a car and drove away.
* * *
As Ur-Daphne had predicted, when I finally started to really study the politics of the war, I began to oppose the conflict. Jerry, who’d been a dove for a while, had teased me, saying, “What’s this? Garrett Adams abandoning his famous scientific objectivity?” But objectivity wasn’t meant to be a license for blind neutrality in the face of self-serving colonialism. For a girl who might not be real, the Schrödinger girl was surely changing my life. Soon, I began to see flyers for the October mobilization posted around campus. There were buses heading to Washington from all over the country. Two buses were leaving from New Paltz, and I arranged a ticket to travel with the doves from my department. However, just days before we were scheduled to leave, Ur-Daphne called and asked me to go with her. She had bought tickets for us on a bus that would leave from the parking lot of her high school. She thought we’d be good company for each other. Of course I accepted Ur-Daphne’s request. The minute SDS Daphne showed up talking about the demonstration, I’d fixated on the idea that my first Daphne might be going too. I needed to see them together, so I would know what was really real, as Bob Dylan said.
Caroline called two nights before the march. She was finally back from San Francisco but needed to work. “I wish I were going,” she said, “but you’re going, right?”
“Yup. Bought the ticket and everything.”
“With your department?”
“Uh-huh,” I answered. This was my first out-and-out lie. I wasn’t sure why she wanted to know, but I wasn’t about to tell her that I had changed my plans to march with Daphne. It wasn’t great hiding the truth, but what harm would it do to let her think I was riding down from New Paltz with my school? I had donated my New Paltz bus ticket to a student who couldn’t afford to buy one.
The night before the march I tried to get to sleep early, yet all I could do was toss and turn. Every time I would drift off I’d startle awake. Finally I slept for an hour, but woke up around eleven thirty. I must have felt guilty about misleading Caroline. I decided to call Jerry seeking absolution. Of course I wouldn’t tell him about the betrayal outright, but I’d hint around enough so he could reassure me that all relationships have secrets. As the phone kept ringing I wondered whom I was kidding. Friday and Saturday nights had always been Jerry’s party nights, and he probably wouldn’t be home. I held the phone to my sweaty ear, sitting on the bed of the cheap motel that was close to Daphne’s school. We were leaving too early the next day to have driven down from home. The cord didn’t reach very far, so I sat upright near the night table of the lumpy bed. The black receiver registered ring after ring. Jerry’s private number didn’t connect to the answering service he used for his patients, even though both lines rang in the same rooms at his apartment. I lazily let the phone continue to make its hollow sound, too stubborn to give up. After the eleventh ring I heard his confused “Hello?” Maybe it was too late to call, but there was no going back.
“Jerome?” I said, using his full, discarded name for comic effect.
“Who’s this?” he asked suspiciously, his voice thick with what I assumed was sleep.
“It’s me.” Who else
called him Jerome?
“Garrett?” he said as though experiencing a great revelation. “Whaddaya want?” he demanded with hostility. This wasn’t the Jerry I knew. Maybe he was with a girl. Or maybe he’d had one too many. I’d seen him do that before, but it was only eleven thirty, early for Jerry on a bar night.
“Is this a bad time? Do you have somebody there? Did you just get in?”
He seemed to have collected himself. “No, it’s fine. I’m alone. I’ve been alone here all night.”
“On Saturday night? That doesn’t sound like you.” I wondered idly if something was wrong, but I was too preoccupied with my own problems to give Jerry much thought. “I’m going to the march tomorrow.”
“Mazel tov,” he said. “Garrett Adams is developing a political conscience. I love it.” But then he seemed to sink back into his earlier confusion. “What march?”
“You know. The big march in Washington to protest the war.”
“Oh yeah, yeah. Now I remember.” There was a time when Jerry would have been trying to drag me along to one of his political events. “What can I do for you, kid?” he pleasantly inquired, now sounding like his old self.
“I just wanted to ask if it’s normal for a couple to keep things from each other. You know, for the good of the other, things that would only hurt. White lie kind of things.”
“Everyone has secrets, kid.” And he hung up the phone.
I wasn’t sure that was very reassuring. Secrets sounded ominous. But when I got back into bed, even the scratchy sheets didn’t keep me awake this time, and I fell into a dreamless sleep free of worries about Jerry or Caroline or the deceit I was visiting on her.
* * *
The bus from Long Island left at four a.m. When I arrived early at the parking lot of Daphne’s high school, I saw a two-toned beige and brown Oldsmobile dropping her off, though the car drove away before I could get a glimpse of her parents. She rushed toward me and said, “Hi, Uncle Garrett!”
That sounded really weird, but she didn’t want to have to explain our unusual friendship. Every secret and deception should have set me wondering if there was something wrong with my preoccupation with the Schrödinger girls, but at that moment I was happy to go along with her little fiction.
The coach bus was comfortable, with large blue seats that reclined, and tinted windows. Daphne brought sandwiches, American cheese and lettuce on kaiser rolls, and I brought a thermos of coffee and hot cups in my backpack. I had prepared answers, should she ask me about the Galen Green portrait again, but she didn’t. She was no longer entranced with physics or psychology and had begun to read French and Spanish literature. Her two greatest finds were Rimbaud and Borges. I had never read either.
“Borges wrote this story,” she told me, “‘The Garden of Forking Paths.’ He created a character who is a spy. He’s Chinese and he works for the Germans because he wants to show them that Asian people can outsmart Europeans. It’s sad, really, because he despises Germans. He finds an English professor who is studying the work of an ancestor, a Chinese ancestor, who has built a labyrinth, except it turns out that the labyrinth is really a novel in which all possible outcomes of events occur simultaneously, and each event leads to further possibilities that have their own forking possibilities.”
I was electrified. Daphne had no idea that she was describing the very reality I had discovered about her life—that all events and explanations have their own forking possibilities and complex conditions. My being on this bus represented the intercession of two Daphnes: SDS Daphne had focused on changing my position, and Ur-Daphne had asked me along. I still hoped to catch a glimpse of both girls together. I was certain SDS Daphne would attend.
“What did you make of the Borges story?” I asked her.
“It’s cool. Maybe a little scary.”
“Scary? Do you ever feel you’re in a world like that?”
“Sometimes. Like when I catch glimpses of myself, it’s as if the world is a mirror. Only it’s not me I’m seeing, it’s someone else.”
“Do you think we live with these forking paths?”
“Maybe.”
I sat for a moment thinking before I explained the connection between Borges’s story and the Schrödinger equation. We’d never discussed the specific science before, this central mathematical description of the quantum reality in which we actually live.
“Do you think Borges studied physics?” she asked.
“I can’t be sure, but I think he must have.” I was finally having the discussion neither Caroline nor Jerry would have with me, and I was just getting started. “So what do you think is happening when you see this doppelgänger?”
I looked intently at her flushed cheeks as she held her breath, but instead of answering my question she avoided my gaze and began talking about the logistics of the march.
* * *
The Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam had planned a grand scheme for this first national antiwar demonstration. An unsanctioned march of three miles to the Pentagon would follow a day of speeches at the Lincoln Memorial. Roughly 100,000 people gathered at the memorial and listened to Dr. Benjamin Spock, Abbie Hoffman, who wore an Uncle Sam top hat, Norman Mailer, and Robert Lowell. I wondered how I was going to find SDS Daphne in so large a crowd. The weather was fine, and there were guitars and music everywhere. Demonstrators held up signs, chanted, and sang. Placards read, LBJ, Pull Out Now, Like Your Father Should Have Done. The crowd chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?” We sang, “It’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam,” and Phil Ochs’s “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.”
Daphne occasionally walked over to teachers and kids she knew from school, but mostly she stayed by my side, so I didn’t have a chance to go off on my own to survey the crowd. Our bus was due to leave at ten p.m. Some of the demonstrators wandered off to go to the Smithsonian or to visit the National Mall, or just to find a nice restaurant, but Daphne wanted to stay and hear all the speakers. I was determined to march for political reasons, of course, but I was also hoping to catch a glimpse of SDS Daphne. Apparently, I had been so restless and craned my neck so often for better views of the mass of people before us that my young companion finally asked just whom I was searching for, but I answered that I wasn’t missing anyone, just recording history.
“If you want to march, it’ll be okay,” I assured her. “Let’s go to the Pentagon. It’s what we’re here for, right?”
She narrowed her eyes and half raised one eyebrow. “But what if things get hairy?”
“That’s why I’m here,” I replied, hoping she was mollified. I didn’t particularly like the pressure I was putting on her, but I couldn’t escape my compulsion to find the other Daphne, whom I was certain was close by. Using electric bullhorns, the organizing committee asked for volunteers to march, warning us that there might be rioting and arrests. I listened carefully for her voice through the bullhorn. I sneaked a peek at this Daphne. I could see that the organizers’ plea was having an effect because she had set her jaw in resolve.
“I feel like we should go,” she said.
Although I wanted to have the chance of finding SDS Daphne, I had begun to change my mind; I couldn’t in good conscience totally abandon my chaperone duties. I decided that we shouldn’t march, SDS Daphne or no. “You heard that it could be dangerous, right?”
“And I heard they need volunteers. Abbie Hoffman said it’s where the real statements would be made. I’ve decided. I’m not going back to the bus. Kids my age are in danger in Vietnam. They’re not going to shoot us or bomb us or napalm us, are they? I just won’t walk on the Pentagon lawn.”
I thought about this further. I might be able to make some progress on solving my mystery, and I couldn’t stop Daphne anyway. “All right, but we have to be sensible,” I replied. “Absolutely no walking on the lawn.”
The crowd had thinned out, and only about 35,000 gathered for
the more risky action. As we marched we sang “We Shall Overcome.” People linked hands. People shared water from canteens. Hippies carried bouquets of flowers.
When we reached the Pentagon, the air was still bright and sunset was almost an hour away. I saw troops with bayoneted rifles lined up along the perimeter of the lawn. They were so achingly young. Their close shaves revealed that the tops of pimples had been sliced off. Under their caps their heads had been so recently buzz cut that you could see the irregularities of their skulls. As they stood with their rifles pointed out, it was their turn to chant. At set intervals they warned: “Stay off the Pentagon lawn.” Above all, these army guys seemed scared. They were facing their own countryfolk with standard weapons of war. Their eyes darted, taking in the children, teenagers, and elderly among the throng. They stayed rooted to their spots, but they were not so densely arranged that it would be impossible to breech their position.
Daphne threaded her way to the front of the crowd, and I followed. Still no sign of SDS Daphne. Near the military guys the tension was visceral. They stared out at the crowd through narrowed eyes that said that if Command told them that their fellow Americans were enemies, then they were enemies, no questions asked. But their pleading eyes also begged the throng not to tread on the grass and force them to use their weapons against us.
Police hovered near the perimeter, itching to arrest any trespassers. As soon as a protester got a toe close to the grass, a hovering soldier with a rifle would stare her down. A young hippie girl sauntered up to a soldier and pushed a daisy into the rifle of his gun. He flinched, and she taunted him, “You’re not afraid of a flower, are you?” Then other hippie women followed suit, scampering onto the lawn and then scampering away. Soon all the rifle barrels sported flowers. Guitarists strummed “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and the hippies chanted, “Flower power!” The soldiers stood immobile, sweat forming on their brows and trickling down their cheeks.
Daphne was riveted by the scene, but I was still frantically searching for SDS Daphne. She had to be here. If I could put all my own doubts to rest and see them both at the same time then I’d know once and for all that they were both real, and Galen’s Daphne too.