by BRIAN HALL
She popped off the couch.
“What’s the matter?” Alex asked, as she retrieved her sweater and anorak, pulled on her shitkickers. “I’m sorry,” they repeated. “I’ve been misreading.”
“No, I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s my fault.”
She fled down the stairs, she scurried north through dark streets.
Was she a freak?
Alex’s single-mindedness—was it right to call it that? The direction. The goal. The whole point. So then, the humor the two of them shared, the programming issues discussed, the talents admired, the considerateness, the coffee, the expressed interest in past and family and feelings—was all of that a ruse?
Was she wrong?
Don’t understand me too quickly. Did Alex want to understand her at all? Did nothing matter but a momentary paroxysm? As though the only reason they were interested in programming was to make the computer explode. Or the only reason she studied chipmunks is so she could find them easily and hit them with a rock.
Was she a freak?
Was wanting to love someone the same as wanting to have sex? Was being lonely the same thing as wanting to share bodies?
Every human and animal on Earth was alive today only because of a two-billion-year unbroken chain of sex, sex, sex. No wonder the world ran on it, look at advertising, look at clickbait, look at jokes. People are robots run by their genes, scraps of code that exist only to keep existing, instructing everyone to care about nothing but seed-spraying, seed-growing, copy-making, or failing that, sublimations like flirting, tonguing, tussling, writhing. One line of code for all life on Earth: if fuckable, then fuck.
Okay, she was a freak, she didn’t want to be reduced to a stand-in for a transport vehicle of soulless monomaniacal fragments of DNA, she was a person, she had thoughts and feelings and a personality, and maybe no one was interested in her, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t interesting. Right? Facts are only facts if someone knows them. If no one knew her, did she exist? Being alone used to be enough, but Alex changed that. She wanted to communicate with a special person, she wanted to teach and learn.
On Monday at Qualternion she forced herself to go to Alex. They had said they’d been misreading, so it was no doubt her fault. Forgive her, she had no experience with dates, she must have suggested something in her body language, her eyes. If she could just explain her point of view to Alex, the way the world looked to her, it all made sense in its own way, in her way. Then the two of them could still be friends, maybe better than before, maybe someday Alex would look at things the way she did, and the two of them could hold hands and walk in the park and program together and sleep next to each other and know each other fully and love each other.
Alex cut her off. “No need to apologize, Morticia. It’s okay. I wanted a fling, you didn’t.” They gave what might have been a rueful little laugh. “I can be too much for some people.” She stood there for a second or two, the eloquent thesis she’d rehearsed in her head for two days spinning tractionless. “It really is okay,” they repeated. “Let’s just get back to work.” And they turned away.
She spent the next twenty-four hours refining and rehearsing a slightly different thesis. When she came to work on Tuesday morning she headed for Alex’s workspace, but Alex wasn’t there. They were perched on the edge of Seo-yeon’s desk, deep in conversation. She stood to one side, waiting her turn, until it gradually became clear that Alex was flirting with Seo-yeon. Jokes and inferences pattered back and forth between them. Their eyes sparkled. It was like watching two Ping-Pong players enjoying a nimble game. Neither of them noticed her, probably, when she walked away.
Yes, she was a freak.
She becomes aware again of the world outside the bus window. The huge concrete plain of O’Hare is rotating slowly around the spindle of its control tower as they pass. She can see planes in the air, descending in orderly lines. People hurrying home to partners, beds waiting.
She texts her mother, who’s been pestering her: Don’t worry about me I’m just dandy.
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
“Any news?”
“I got a text from her a minute ago.”
“What did it say?”
“It made me more worried.”
“Noted. What did it say?”
“Hold on a sec. I know you’ll want it word for word.”
“Yes, why not?”
“Need to make sure I’m giving it to you precisely correctly.”
“Our discussion will be more apropos. You must see that.”
“Must I? Apparently, I must. Here it is—‘Don’t worry about me I’m just dandy.’”
“. . . ”
“Yes, Professor?”
“That doesn’t sound like her.”
“Good. Even you see it.”
“That’s not fair.”
“You’re clueless, you’ve said it yourself.”
“Not so much about her. Anyway, I like to think. You’ve spent nearly all the time with her. I wish you had let me—I’ve said all that before.”
“Yes, you have.”
“She didn’t say where she was?”
“I just read you the complete text.”
“Did you—”
“To enable apropos discussion.”
“Did you text her back?”
“I wanted to check with you first.”
“. . . ”
“To see if you’d heard anything from her.”
“I would have told you.”
“Would you have?”
“Of course. I knew you were worried.”
“Whereas you’re not.”
“Not really.”
“Not even now.”
“No, not really.”
“You just said it doesn’t sound like her.”
“It sounds sarcastic, and she’s not usually sarcastic, that’s all. How many times did you text her?”
“You haven’t tried to get in touch with her at all, have you? That’s why she texted me instead of you.”
“I’ve been working—”
“Christ!”
“—and I figured if she wanted to communicate with me, she would.”
“So you’ve never entertained the idea that someone might need reassurance, might need someone else to take the first step. A child needing that from her parent.”
“That’s the subject you’ve made it clear you don’t want to talk about.”
“What’s that?”
“Whose child she is.”
“For Christ’s sake, Mark, she thinks exactly like you.”
“You know I’m not talking about that—”
“Like you squared.”
“You’re wasting time. And by the way, her mind is quite different from mine. She has a temperamental need to be an autodidact. That could help or hurt her, foster originality or make her a crank. I think—”
“Who’s wasting time now?”
“I’m just trying to be accurate.”
“Unlike sloppy me.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m—I’m— Look, could we just talk about this calmly?”
“So you’re telling me to calm down.”
“Yes.”
“. . . ”
“Hello?”
“. . . ”
“Hello?”
1993–1994
Looking back, trying to calm down, she reminds herself that she’s always had a thing for tall, older men. Maybe because her father is short, and she had an allergic reaction to that asshole when she was thirteen. Or maybe because her father seemed tall to her when he mysteriously vanished when she was four years old, and she spent her formative years fantasizing about his whereabouts and activities in naus
eatingly romantic terms, until he reappeared when she was thirteen and proved himself to be a short asshole.
She’d hated high school, thought college would be different. Believe it or not, she imagined a community of scholars who would stimulate each other intellectually. The faculty would be no more than facilitators, wise mentors; in her imagination, mostly male—see absent father, above. Of course the mostly male part turned out be true. She was actually surprised that college had grades. She lived in her own world, she sees now. By her third semester she had one foot out the door. She saw the desirability of studying a broad range of subjects, but thought the distribution requirements were insultingly rigid. (Insulting, because it assumed students would seek to evade becoming “well-rounded” if not hemmed in by rules.) At the same time she wasn’t blind to the fact that many of her fellow students were neither self-motivated nor intellectually stimulating nor discernibly interested in learning anything. In other words, college really wasn’t much different from high school.
She thought, well fuck this rodeo. (Man, she must have been insufferable. No wonder she didn’t have any friends.) For her third semester she ignored her adviser’s suggestion about getting certain requirements out of the way and just took what she wanted: Woolf and Auden, Beginning Arabic, Principles of Limnology, The French Revolution, Astronomy. It was a heavy load, but she already suspected she was going to save her mother and herself a ton of money by not continuing, and she didn’t have any friends, nor at that time wanted any (you know—you can’t fire me, I quit), and she liked the idea of going out in a blaze, or at least a wan glow, of scholarly lucubration. (Using words nobody else knows: see having no friends, above.)
So she was exhausted a lot of the time, but really kind of having fun, haunting the libraries and hauling around piles of books and being the butt of jokes and ignoring people. The limnology class was drier than she’d expected (cheap irony!) but it overlapped with marshland ecology, which she’d always been interested in because the plot of land she’d grown up on was next door to a swampy little delta. Woolf and Auden was a blast, not least because the professor, a small hirsute male chordate d’un certain age, was so egotistical he might have been clinically insane, which condition she found so absurd she grew fond of him, in a semi-horrified way. He, in his turn, took a shine to her because she was just the sort of woman he liked: interested in a subject he knew ten times as well, and half his diminutive size. Arabic was a lot of work, but she loved learning how to read that gorgeous script and try to make those amazing sounds with her throat, and as for the French Revolution, a blood-soaked object lesson about societal collapse appealed to her sense of alienation.
And astronomy? Well . . . That one’s a tad embarrassing. One of her adolescent fantasy father-lover figures was Tycho Brahe, the sixteenth-century astronomer who built an observatory on an island a brief pirate’s sail south of Hamlet’s castle and compiled the most accurate star catalog to date. Why Brahe? Suffice it to say that he was Danish and tyrannical and forever out of reach, just like her dad.
She has an uneasy feeling she may have done something cringeworthy at an early astronomy lecture, something to get the professor’s attention and simultaneously maybe take him down a peg. (Shower me with approval, aren’t I the smart daughter, and by the way, fuck you.) Whatever it was, she remembers she felt embarrassed, and reined herself in after that. Then a few weeks later there was a post-lecture exchange on god knows what when she practically made a pass at him. (Bathe me in lust, aren’t I the sexy daughter, and by the way, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?) For the rest of the semester, she forbade herself further antics.
But she had to admit she was attracted to him. And it didn’t have to be for solely unhealthy reasons, right? Because, yes, he was older and accomplished, but really the person he most reminded her of was her younger brother. He displayed an oblivious absorption in his subject that called to mind six-year-old Quinnie regaling her with the nutritional preferences of dinosaur species she’d never heard of. She remembered an early lecture when he was explaining emission spectra, and he’d brought in a step stool and colored Ping-Pong balls, and he stood on various steps and stepped down one or two or three levels and tossed away different colored balls to represent the emission of photons of different wavelengths when electrons jumped from higher to lower states. The whole idea was so corny, and made downright comical by the fact that he couldn’t seem to keep himself from demonstrating every possible energy shift, long after the point had been made. He was exhausting the permutations because, for the zillionth time, they were fascinating him.
He was a beanpole, almost a marsh-wiggle. She thought when she first talked to him he must be 6’2”, then found out later he was 6’4”, only he slumped. He had narrow shoulders and large hands, a beaky nose with a fluorescent gleam along the flat bridge, gray eyes and sandy hair in an awful cut, and the kind of pale pink skin that turns papery in middle age. When she spoke to him the second time (what was it about? she seems to remember Saturn) her main impression was one of helpless honesty. He was simply too obtuse socially to be anything but straightforward. (Maybe another relevant thing to know about her dad is that he is a sociopath and an adept reader of character and consequently an extremely good liar.)
So there you have it: a man with the rough physical outline of a father to replace the one who charmed and abandoned her, but temperamentally like the younger brother she raised and protected and loved. What girl could resist? She teased out from the department secretary the information that he wasn’t married, and sometime after she left school she sent him a brazen note, something on the order of, Hey, you alluring gormless telephone pole, how about you and me?
He didn’t respond for a while, which she resented but also respected (after all, she had once been his student), but then he called her, which thrilled her and also made her think less of him (for god’s sake, she was his student just yesterday!). They met for coffee, or maybe lunch, no, probably just coffee, and she remembers that she warmed to his kindness, lusted after his hands, wished he’d let her cut his hair and powder his nose, and wondered how quickly his total absorption in his subject would drive her crazy. She also wondered if he was a virgin. She liked the idea, anyway. (“Who’s the professor now?”) But it turned out he’d had a couple of girlfriends in his twenties. Still, maybe they only held hands and shopped together for Rubik’s Cubes.
He worked a lot, so it took three or four weeks to accomplish, but she thinks they had a lunch date, and definitely a dinner date. He was considerate of the waitstaff, which earned him brownie points. Unlike many men, he asked her questions about herself and her opinions and seemed actually to find her answers interesting. On the other hand, it was a lucky thing she was already into astronomy, because he did talk an awful lot about it, and she could more or less tell when his mind fell into a rut in his brain and proceeded to rattle down it like a driverless stagecoach. She dislikes labels, because what’s most interesting about people are the things that make them unique, but she supposes this could be called perseverating.
In April he asked her if she wanted to see the Lyrids with him and she thought, Ahh, this is how astronomers get up the nerve to kiss a gal.
Because not the tiniest whiff of that had occurred in their three dates thus far. When he said good night, he stepped back, tucked his elbow, and executed a vibrating little-boy wave. It occurred to her that he might be unconsciously invoking childishness to hide from himself what he really wanted and perhaps felt ambivalent about (she had been his student, etc). Sure, she could have grabbed his lapels and done a chin-up, but for chrissake, he was thirty-four years old. It was time to grow up. If he liked it, he should put a smooch on it.
She had never let him drive to the old commune to pick her up because that felt way too old-school, too Ozzie and Harriet (and besides, she didn’t like people seeing the conditions she lived in), so on the night in question she borrowed Jo’s clapped-out Honda and f
etched him from his cute little Arts and Crafts house in a less palatial part of Cayuga Heights. He piled in with blankets and a thermos of hot chocolate and the little-boy wave. It was 35 degrees Fahrenheit, 1:30 a.m., April 20, 1994.
He’d explained at a length that would have been absurd even if she’d been an ignoramus on matters lunar, which she was far from being, but she’d let him do it (see condition that will remain unlabeled, above): the peak of the meteor shower would occur on the night of April 22–23, but by then the moon would be only three days away from full, which would make viewing harder because it would be up for most of the night and, you know, when there’s a bright light like the near-full moon in the sky, then seeing fainter meteors is harder because, you know, your eyes adjust to the brighter light, that is, your pupils contract, and your retina receives less light, which it needs if you want to clearly perceive fainter signals, such as—
She drove them to the top of Mount Pleasant, where there was a 360-degree view and the grounds around the small university observatory made a comfortable place to lie down. The pesky moon was just setting. They spread out one blanket and piled the others at its foot for use as needed, shared hot chocolate while waiting for their eyes to adjust to the dark, then lay down side by side. After a moment he sat up again to take one of the spare blankets and cover himself. He was careful to keep the blanket from touching her also, because who knows, that might suggest something. After another minute she grabbed another blanket to cover herself.
They lay in silence. After several minutes of meteor-free viewing, he said, “We might see only five or six an hour. They’ll radiate out of the constellation Lyra.”
“That’s why they’re called the Lyrids,” she confirmed.