Split

by Lisa Michaels

  I walked with the guard toward the exit to show him we meant no further harm, and Mau trailed behind, looking backward at the rocks as if at some unfinished business.

  “This must be a tough job,” I said to the guard, going into overkill. Then it struck me: it probably was tough. The boredom, the low pay, the daily enforcement of rules that you didn’t devise and that people chafed at and blamed you for. This kind of thought came to me from my father. He often asked people about their jobs: supermarket checkers, car-wash boys. And the stories they told him were always slightly unexpected, a glimpse of work from the inside. At the end of the day, if the register didn’t balance, you were docked for the difference, or, look at this, the wheel glaze made your hands break out in a rash.

  “Well, it’s the best work I can get,” the security guard said. “I’ve got some abnormalities.” He made a sweeping motion over his gut, and I thought I caught a glimpse of webbing between his fingers. In my heat-struck state, the guard was beginning to look like a cartoon—that enormous waist and tiny head—with a cartoon’s putty-colored flesh. Mau pulled alongside us at the mention of abnormalities and began examining the man with interest.

  “My mother, she had three arms,” the guard told us, glancing back toward the rock garden to see if anyone was within earshot. “I was a rough sort, and she’d wash the dishes with two hands and slap me with the extra.”

  We stood before him, rapt.

  “She didn’t even have to turn around,” the guard went on, warming to his subject. “It came off her back, sort of.” He gestured toward his shoulder blades.

  I tried to think of something to say. “Well, we’re sorry if we caused any trouble.”

  At the reference to the rocks, the guard seemed to remember his duties. His chest swelled and his head reared back: “The sign was right there, plain as day: don’t touch the rocks. But he had to stick his paw in.” He kept a wary eye on Mau as we walked away.

  Later, we left the gardens, and Mau bought a pineapple at the supermarket—it seemed just the thing—and sliced it on his tailgate with a bowie knife. I felt as if I had known him for ages. Years later, it was the guard we would remember when we recalled that day, his webby hands, his haunches tapering to tiny feet. A vast man, deerlike and sad, stationed at the doorway to the Garden of Tranquillity.

  Every month or so during the school year, I got together with my father for dinner. He would drive out to Westwood and we’d meet at Mario’s, a small Italian restaurant with empty Chianti bottles strung from the ceiling and candles in red glass orbs. A meal at Mario’s was always reliably middling: salad in checkered wooden bowls, pasta with meat sauce. The waiters served with bored efficiency and then left us alone.

  My father loved that place. He loved all good things that stayed the same. When he moved to a new neighborhood, he would find a dry cleaner he liked—one who did decent work and settled without a fuss when a shirt got ruined—and an honest mechanic, and then repay them with unflagging loyalty. For twenty years he had been ready to upend the status quo, but in his private life he preferred ritual and regularity.

  One Sunday night, I walked down the hill from my apartment and met him at the restaurant door. My father gave me a hug and paid his perennial compliment: “How do you stay so thin?” Once upon a time, I would have given him a few ill-informed dietary pointers. Now I just shrugged and pulled away.

  The maitre d’ remembered my father’s face, if not his name, and gave us a quiet booth. My father sank into the vinyl and sighed: “God, honey. I’m so tired.”

  We were all of ten minutes together and already peevishness had settled over me like an old coat. He was just a man, trying to make his way like anybody else, but I took his exhaustion personally. I suppose I wanted to see him on an even keel, wanted him to model a life of moderation and balance. Even then I knew it wasn’t fair: you have children, and suddenly your life is no longer for itself.

  “What have you been up to?” I asked him.

  “Well, I’m almost finished with the book, and there’s still a lot going on with the campaign. We’re still in the middle of a very important struggle…” He trailed off.

  The campaign had been his lifework for the past few years: a fight to keep GM Van Nuys open, the last auto plant in California. I had followed the main turns in the battle and had gone to a few rallies, but it was typical that I couldn’t say now what events he spoke of that day or why they were important. I had my ear tuned to only one thing: his boasting, which filled me with scorn. “I’m playing a very pivotal role in this fight,” he was saying. “And it’s a fight that is going to have national significance.” I didn’t let him get away with much. If he crowed over a triumph, I heard only the crowing and missed the chance to savor what he’d won. I was prideful to a fault, but tried to assume a public modesty. What I didn’t see: that his boasts covered the pains of questioning and self-doubt.

  I spent those dinners in bitter quiet, withholding my full attention to signal displeasure, but never daring to flush the topic into the open. My father wasn’t insensible to this. He saw my cinched-up face and talked past it, afraid to face things head-on. I may sound harsh in the recounting, but I suffered from my own pose. I was ashamed to love him. Once I saw his faults, it seemed foolish. I held him at a distance in order to examine him, but then I couldn’t examine him. It was like looking at the sun. He stumbled ahead, raw, full of expectations, trying to check his desires. “Is it all right if we talk about my work for a while?” he’d ask, and I’d feel sheepish that he needed permission. Then he’d talk too long, a breathless detouring monologue that wore out my patience.

  “You know I ran into a friend from college the other day—god, has it been twenty years? He was pretty progressive back then, had pretty good politics, but now he’s totally dropped out. Just trying to make money. I mean, we made so many real gains in the sixties—in civil rights, putting some kind of check on the worst excesses of imperialism—but there’s so much to be done, it’s really frightening.”

  (Indeed it must have been grim to watch all his old comrades defecting. I noticed, around then, a grudging admiration when I told people of his generation—my professors, my friends’ parents—what my father did: “He’s still an activist. A labor organizer.” When they heard this, I watched them go through some kind of momentary reckoning.)

  While my father went on talking, I watched a piece of carbon cycle in the hot candle wax. It occurred to me that he and I were like magnets turned to the wrong ends—drawn together, and when we came closer, driven apart.

  “So what do you think?” he asked.

  “About what?”

  “About what I was telling you.”

  This was a crucial moment, one we’d come to a hundred times. He’d said his piece and now he wanted me to “engage.” As it was, I couldn’t even offer a few comments to appease him, the kind of exchange I would have granted to a stranger. While he talked, my mind had wandered, and now I hadn’t a clue what he had said.

  When my father saw that nothing was coming, he changed his tack. “God, there was something I was going to ask you,” he said. He cocked his head to the side, chasing a stray thought. “Oh, yeah.” He put his hands on the table. “How are you?”

  We stared at each other for a beat, then burst out laughing.

  Only when it was time to go did I truly soften toward him. My father and I said goodbye on the sidewalk, and I watched him walk away. At the end of the block he paused, hands stuffed in his pockets, unsure as to where he had parked. That confusion, so familiar, struck me like a blow. I thought, Someday he’ll be dead. It was half dread, half furious wish. I stood there in the middle of the streams of passersby, trying to imagine it, gingerly, the way you’d thumb the edge of a bruise. I wanted to know what I would lose. All I could come up with were a few simple things: some songs my father had taught me; the way he laughed with his whole body, convulsed.

  I didn’t often indulge in fears of his dying. It was my mother I l
ost over and over, the way as a child I used to throw my favorite ring down in the grass for the strange pleasure of seeing it lost among the blades. My father seemed immune to death. He was rarely sick and came from a line of Methuselahs, his grandmother still alive then at ninety-three, still alive now at one hundred four. He insisted he would live to be ninety, and I believed him. But guilt made me see the mortal man, the one I loved more than I could show. I started to run down the street to tell him this, but then the crowd converged around him and he was gone.

  I had bad luck in the enrollment lottery the next quarter and had to stand in line for hours to try to pick up an extra class. The line snaked through Ackerman Ballroom, a vast hall where hundreds of students napped or read or slumped against the walls, waiting to hear their numbers called so they could scan the lists of open courses. What was left was usually the dregs: the history of Mesopotamia; a seminar on Beowulf; Advanced Logic. The only class I could find that day was a philosophy course on the mind/body question.

  I was a little breathless on the first day, as the professor sketched out the topic. Are the mind and body separate? Is there such a thing as a soul? Those questions made me feel muddled and illused, yet filled me with a quickening faith in myself. I think I even harbored some hope of contributing to the great philosophical debate on the subject, but I cloaked this hope in the garb of self-exploration. I marked off a section of my three-ring binder. There, in those pages, I would make an inquiry into the state of my being, and in the bargain I’d try to land an A in Philosophy 107.

  To aid in this important work, I sometimes got stoned with my friend Alex before class. Alex was my roommate. Her father was the Rodney Dangerfield of Hong Kong. He started out as a dishwasher in China and now made ten movies a year and lived in a villa in Kowloon. Her mother was English and a dead ringer for Nanny in Nanny and the Professor. Alex looked like a very beautiful boy, with spiky hair and slim hips. She wore motorcycle boots and a Hello Kitty backpack and rode a skateboard across campus. At Christmas break she went home via the south of France and Phuket. The world seemed very small to her and, hence, dull. Pot seemed to ease her ennui.

  Our class met in a Moorish-style building in South Campus—traditionally science territory, where I rarely set foot. Alex and I met in the courtyard and sat in one of the sandstone arches passing a pipe back and forth. She was meticulous with her equipment: a metal pipe with a cleaning tool that she used religiously between bowls, and a small box of wooden matches, to which she had affixed a strip of grip tape as a striking surface. When the deed was done, we went in and took seats at the top of the steeply raked auditorium. I never thought it strange that we were to learn the intricacies of one of life’s great questions at a ratio of two hundred students to one teacher; nor did it occur to me that I was failing my end of the bargain by arriving stoned. I was just grateful not to have to make eye contact with the professor, and to be able to slip out unobtrusively if the lecture got dull.

  Professor Howe was fat and stooped, with a monk’s fringe of white hair. He paced back and forth across the dais, one hand tucked at the small of his back, the other holding a tiny microphone, designed to clip to a lapel, which he pressed to his lips, so his sibilants rasped over the PA system.

  I expected, when I signed up for the class, that we would be taught some basic ground rules for philosophical writing, and then be asked to expound on the mind/body question. My first assumption was quickly disproved: Professor Howe cared not a whit what we thought about the matter. Surely the man knew well what kind of work would be turned in—late, of course—if he opened the door to our native philosophical charms: unsupported theories laid out in butchered prose, pages and pages of meandering without the spoor of an original idea. I was sitting up in the nosebleed section, a little toasted, a little exhilarated at the chance to let my mind run, when Professor Howe whipped out the syllabus and cut me off at the knees. We would spend the entire ten weeks studying Descartes’s Meditations. It was a very subtle and complicated piece of work, Professor Howe explained. He had spent his whole life studying its proofs, but in ten weeks, if we paid meticulous attention, we might trace our pens over the great man’s argument and perhaps get it straight.

  Late in the quarter, when I had resigned myself to the structure of the class, I watched Professor Howe go through a fit of inspiration. His lecture style was generally dull and droll, but one day he came into class with a sheaf of papers in his hand and his hair worked up into a silver laurel around his ears.

  “I have come across something interesting. It is probably nothing, but I think—” He fumbled through his notes, leaned over the lectern, and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I think I may have discovered a flaw in Descartes’s argument.”

  Professor Howe launched into the details of his discovery, but he never once looked up into the seats. He was lost within himself, the microphone held so closely he was practically chewing on it, and he might as well have put the thing down, as he had all but forgotten his audience. It was a private performance. He was running his idea through a system of checks, and we were the silent witnesses, present but unnecessary. There was a faint ripple of interest in the class. A few people folded their newspapers and sat up straighter, watching Professor Howe pace and gesticulate below. Anyone could see from the man’s restless energy that something grave was at stake. I had the feeling that I was privy to a great event, the significance of which was lost on me. I craned to get a look at the teaching assistants, who sat in the front row. They were all at full alert; some of them were taking frantic notes.

  From what I understood, his discovery was deceptively simple. Descartes, it seemed, had committed a fallacy of substitution. That is, he had “proved” an idea in one context, and then—considering it a firm block that could hold the weight of further suppositions—he had shifted it slightly, so it was used in a different way on the next go. “Descartes has pulled a feat of legerdemain,” Professor Howe muttered. “A very clever one, mind you, hard to pin down, but nonetheless a fallacy … It’s right here.”

  I found it hard to believe that in the 340 years since Descartes had penned his theory, no one had noticed this error. But Professor Howe was obviously well versed in the debates held in learned circles, and he was quite lathered up over his breakthrough.

  At last, he wore himself out. “Well, maybe it’s something or maybe it will come to nothing at all,” he said, looking at his feet. After a moment of silence, he glanced up into the seats, and seemed surprised to find all two hundred of us sitting there.

  “That’s it,” he said. His shoulders went slack and he looked over at his teaching assistants with a blank, wondering look, as if to say, “Have I done it, or am I out of my mind?”

  The next week, Professor Howe came to class a changed man. His clothes were neat, his hair was combed, and he looked like he’d been popped with a pin. All the wild-eyed vitality had left him. He clipped the microphone to his lapel for the first time and put both hands on the lectem to steady himself. “Last week … it was all a mistake,” he said, clearing his throat. “Now let’s turn to the third part of Descartes’s theorem ‘Of God, That He Exists.’”

  That was the end of my high-flown hopes of defining the mind/body connection. If this man had thrown himself against the ramparts and failed, I didn’t see much point in my trying. But it occurs to me now that the whole thing might have been a charade—a great performance to stir the curious few into wakefulness. Perhaps Professor Howe staged his discovery to dramatize how much was still at stake in the dried pages of a three-century-old thesis.

  But what of my own opinions on this weighty subject? Did I believe in a soul at all? I think I did. It didn’t have anything to do with God; I just couldn’t believe we boiled down to a bit of electrified neurochemicals. There was something more than that to being human. The sum was more than its parts. We could change the shape of our bodies, after all, we could smooth or ruffle our pulse, and perhaps—as I had tried that previous summer—we
could alter other, deeper workings. It seemed a shame, and somehow vain and improbable, that nothing important to being went on outside our skulls. A bit of us had to travel out—I might have said it like that. I sometimes imagined each of us with a kind of nimbus of self or will lifting from our bodies, until it became indistinguishable from the air.

  Between classes, fifteen hours a week, I worked as a clerk at the anatomy-department office, typing up invoices for white mice, monkey food, and human legs. And there I did a bit of research into the mind/body question.

  One door over, Benny, the mortician, received the cadavers that had been donated to science. Benny was a dapper man with a belly as round as a medicine ball and a graceful walk. He was responsible for draining the corpses, pumping them full of formaldehyde, and, sometimes, cutting them into parts. Very few people donate their bodies to science, and those who do are often chopped up in order to get the most use out of them: heads to the eye surgeons, legs to the orthopedists, and so on. Benny often wore a blood-spattered smock, its active pattern of russet drops making my stomach turn when I passed him in the hall. Underneath the white coat, he wore expensive suits, and when there was downtime—there seemed to be lots of downtime, between deliveries or while the bodies drained—he played poker in the office with his assistant, a doleful Italian man who rarely spoke. I was in awe of these men, their droll, efficient handling of triplicate forms and death. On Benny’s desk was a paperweight—a cross section of a human arm encased in Lucite—which I studied with mild horror whenever I came in for his signature. It bothered me that the bone was off center—a white round near one edge, with the marrow showing. I knew so little of what went on beneath my skin.

  Now and then a body arrived when Benny was out of the office, and I would guide the delivery man and the covered gurney down the hall and let him into the morgue. There was an anteroom with steel tables and sinks, a wall of windows that let onto the anatomy labs where the medical students did their dissections, and at the back of the room a massive door that led to a walk-in freezer. I felt a nervy fascination when I entered that room. I examined the scrubbed tables, the tubing and pumps against one wall. Everything looked tidy and sterile, yet I had the feeling that if I stayed long enough in that place, some mystery of life would be revealed. But before I could reach any conclusions, the smell of formaldehyde would overwhelm me and I’d hurry out, yanking the door shut behind me.