My mother shot Whit a stare. “People are concerned,” she said.
“People?” I asked. “My father died. It’s okay if I’m not adjusting right away. Should I be out jogging and singing in the streets? Who are these people, anyway?”
Arlen said, “I’m pretty good with the future…it’s the present that gives me trouble.”
My mother said, “People in general. We’ll talk more tomorrow, but this has gone far enough.”
Something in my mother’s tone. I said, “Mom, don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. Worry about yourself. You’re shacked up with Dad’s only friend and he hasn’t even been dead for a year.”
Arlen stared at the refrigerator. Whit lowered his eyes, scanned options—a man trained to think during times of conflict. I saw her hand move and felt myself lean into it. She slapped my face so hard it made my teeth grind. I saw faint specks of yellow and gold from the stinging sound. It was the first real sensation I’d felt since my father’s hospital room. Whit looked away out of respect. Arlen looked down at his hands. My mother’s bottom lip trembled as she rushed from the kitchen.
After a long silence, Whit said, “Arlen, let me get you bunked down and I’ll get you up for the bus in the morning.”
Whit led Arlen down the hallway. My cheek was burning and I put my hand on it. I was too tired to look for my father’s letter. Upstairs I heard my mother open and close a series of doors.
THE NEXT MORNING, AFTER ARLEN left, Whit and my mother acted as if nothing had happened. They wanted to go for a drive, to talk things through, and I agreed. It was a Saturday morning and I planned to see a De Niro double feature later that day. We drove through downtown in Whit’s Ford Escort. He drove like an undertaker, a disgrace to NASA.
“How often you change the oil in this thing, Whit?” I asked.
“Every three thousand, like clockwork.”
“Figures.”
We made a left by the library and headed into the small commercial zone. Our town was a maze of banks, diners, shoe stores, and dental offices. People were shod, they ate, they borrowed money, they had their teeth capped and straightened; this was called existence. Whit stopped the car in front of a small sandstone building with large, shuttered windows.
“What are we stopping for?” I asked.
“I’ve got to drop something off,” my mother said. “But why don’t we all go. Maybe we can get a malted at the drugstore.”
“It’s nine in the morning. Since when is that an hour for malteds?” I asked.
“Come on. Be adventurous,” she said. The tone in her voice was so hollow, so foreign to her true demeanor.
We all got out of the car and walked toward the sandstone building. My mother went inside and Whit and I followed, down a hallway and into a reception area that was filled with flowering plants and provincial landscapes on the walls. Did this office belong to an orthodontist? There was no receptionist; it was a Saturday, yet the door had been left open. I looked at a small business-card holder on the reception desk. In elegant, embossed letters stood the name DR. CLYDE KAPLANSKY. My mother had brought me to see Darius Kaplansky’s father, the town shrink, the father of the boy who beat me in the seventh-grade science fair and whose image—myopic, slope-shouldered—had lived in my mind ever since as the patron saint of miserable genius.
“What the hell is this?” I said.
“Just talk to him. He’s very experienced in grief counseling,” my mother said.
“Grief counseling?” I scoffed.
Whit stood like a jailer at the front door. I wanted to punch him in the stomach.
Clyde Kaplansky appeared at the end of the hallway in cuffed pants and boating shoes, a practiced and amiable version of concern in his face. “Hello, Nathan,” he said.
“I’d really prefer not to discuss things right now.”
My mother said, “We’ll come back in an hour and take you out to lunch.”
“Let’s just have a chat,” Clyde said. He extended an arm and gestured toward the hallway. He kept his fingers relaxed and un-pointed, the way you hold your hand out for a dog to smell.
Clyde’s office was full of Swedish designer furniture—swayback leather seats and a moleskin daybed.
“Have a seat,” he said. His eyebrows were a tangle of gray.
I sat in one of the chairs and leaned back.
He said, “Do you want to tell me some things?”
I crossed my legs and folded my arms.
“Do you want to talk about your father?” He put his hands behind his head, a gesture meant to telegraph ease. “So, what have you been doing with yourself? Last I knew you’d had a terrible car accident.”
“For a while I was memorizing the world, one fact at a time. But I think my memory is fading. Sometimes I don’t remember what day it is.”
“Memory can be the way back or the way forward.”
“Poetic. Could be a bumper sticker for amnesiacs. How’s Darius?” I asked.
“Fine, thank you.”
“Do you remember the seventh-grade science quiz? You realize that I knew the final answer, right? For the record. I knew it.”
“I didn’t agree to talk to you because I wanted to revisit the seventh-grade science fair. Your mother thinks you need to get something off your chest.”
“But you knew that I knew, right?” I asked.
“We all knew you knew,” he said.
“So, I could have beat Darius.”
“On that particular day, yes. Why don’t you tell me what you’re angry about?”
“What do you want to hear? Do people sit here and spill their guts about being angry at God and their parents? No. I’m not angry. Not anymore. I’m waiting.”
“For what?”
“A sign of real life,” I said.
“Don’t you think you make real life happen?”
“No. I think it happens to you.”
“That could lead to passivity.”
“I’ve got plenty of time.”
“You follow people?”
“Sometimes.”
“Why?”
“Espionage. I’m trying to find out what makes them tick.”
“What makes you tick?” he asked.
“They teach you that in shrink school? Ask the patient what makes them tick?”
He leaned back, disengaging. “See, now, that’s aggression. Are you angry because your father abandoned you?”
He had a little bonsai tree on his desk. I pictured him pruning it with nail scissors. “ Whatever you say.”
“You never measured up to his standard. Just when you had a chance to be special, he left. I’m filling in the blanks from what your mother has told me.”
“You’re right. I am angry. I’m angry because people like you chart the stages of grief and think it’s reality. Has it ever occurred to you that there might be no plan for things?”
“It’s occurred to me. Certain philosophers think the universe is random.”
“It’s not. It’s worse than random. The universe is out to get us.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“I said it, didn’t I?”
“Tell me what you feel when you think about your father.”
“I’m about done talking now. I know you mean well, but everything is under control. Tell my mother that I’m fine and I’ll be more discreet.”
“Come back and talk to me. It would make your mother happy.”
“Is Darius in med school?”
“Not exactly.”
“Harvard?”
Clyde looked at his hands through the glass desktop. “Darius lives outside of town. He teaches people yoga and how to meditate. I don’t see him much.”
“What?”
“He decided not to go to college,” he said quietly.
“Wow.” I blew some air between my lips.
“Unexpectedly,” he added.
“I’d like to see him,” I said.
“Come and see me. We’ll tal
k.”
I got up to leave.
“Nathan?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s possible you’ve had some kind of nervous breakdown. This might be beyond the normal range for grief.”
His voice had no color.
“So long,” I said.
Outside, Whit and my mother were parked, waiting. I got in the backseat and they feigned casualness.
“You’re back so soon. How did that go?” my mother asked.
“I’m cured. Thanks for asking.”
She sighed and Whit threw the car into reverse.
forty-one
Dear Dad,
I ran into Clyde Kaplansky today. He said maybe I’d had a nervous breakdown after your death. Emerson said discontent is the infirmity of will. Where would evolution be without discontent—would anything change if we were happy all the time? Darius, the boy genius, decided not to go to college. I don’t know why that’s such a relief.
Love,
Nathan
P.S. Arlen told me that you wrote a letter to God before you died. If that’s true, I’m afraid to read it.
forty-two
I tracked Darius down through the phone book. He lived in a derelict farmhouse outside of town. It was a kind of commune, full of outcasts from Madison, hippie girls, vegans and fruitarians, people who grew vegetables and made clothes from hemp. I drove out there Sunday morning. A line of children were picking blackberries in the road-ditch brambles as I pulled up. The farmhouse listed to one side and stood wrapped by a rotting wooden porch. As I walked up to the front stoop it smelled of mildew, like sea moss. A woman my age, wearing a sarong and a head wrap, came to the door.
“Hello, stranger,” she said.
“Is Darius here?”
“Who?”
“Darius Kaplansky.”
“You mean Taro?”
“Do I?” I asked.
“Come inside.” She held open the screen door.
I entered the kitchen, which was littered with the remnants of a feast. Large ceramic bowls, clay goblets, and hand-painted serving trays were strewn everywhere.
“We had a full-moon gathering last night,” she said.
“It was a full moon? I knew I was having a weird day.”
She laughed politely. “I’ll go get Taro. Have a seat.”
I moved toward an old potbelly stove and sat down in a wicker chair. I didn’t know exactly why I was here. Part of it was the shock of Darius ending up as a commune brother, but part of it was something I didn’t quite understand. I’d been led back to him.
“Can I help you?”
He stood in the kitchen in mechanic’s overalls. He had a thoughtful goatee and shoulder-length hair. I hadn’t seen him since shortly after the seventh-grade science fair, when he’d left for an East Coast prep school. He now bore no resemblance to the spindle-necked nerd of grade school. His eyes seemed unnaturally clear and he no longer wore glasses.
“Jesus, is that you, Darius?” I asked.
“Taro. Who are you?”
“It’s me. Nathan Nelson.”
Darius raised his eyebrows and came forward. “Well, hello. What brings you out this way?”
“I don’t know. I wanted to look you up. You look…different. I saw your dad yesterday.”
He came toward the table.
“Sweet. How is he? Was this, like, in a professional capacity?”
“Long story,” I said.
“Hey, about your dad…sorry to hear about that.” He kept his arms by his side.
“Yeah, thanks.”
“Come on up to my room. I’ll make us some tea,” he said.
Tea? He’d become my mother—Darjeeling and lemongrass—this couldn’t be good.
I followed Darius through a living room where a silk parachute was suspended from the ceiling and Turkish floor cushions were spread in all directions. We climbed a rickety staircase and entered a room at the end of the hallway. A small futon and something resembling a large plastic coffin dominated the room.
“What is that?” I asked. On closer inspection I saw that it was a giant plastic egg.
“Sensory-deprivation tank. I spend an hour a day in there.” He placed one hand on top of it gently.
“Doing what?”
“Floating.”
“Why?”
“You float in skin-temperature water, loaded with Epsom salts, and it’s completely dark. It’s just you and your thoughts. It’s like swimming in your own consciousness.”
“Scary.”
He moved to the corner of the room. “How do you take your tea?”
“What kind is it?”
“Licorice and burdock root.”
“I’ll skip it.”
“It’s great for the liver.”
“So is gin,” I said.
“Never touch the stuff.” There was no judgment in this comment. He gestured to the futon and we sat. There was a long, awkward silence as we both contemplated the nature of my visit. We sat on his narrow futon and I glanced at the few books on the shelves—Walden, I Ching, The Bhagavad Gita. After a few moments, the egg-shaped tank opened and a young woman stepped out and stood naked, dripping onto the jute rug. She was nineteen or twenty, with a face that was pale and freckled.
“Not today,” she said, slicking some water off with a towel.
“What’s wrong?” Darius asked, a little disappointed on her behalf.
“Too much me in the way,” she said. She smiled at me, oblivious to her condition. I looked at her bare stomach and breasts.
“This is an old friend from grade school,” Darius said.
I stood to shake her hand but she ignored the introduction. Formalities seemed irrelevant in this household. Outside of pornography, I had never seen a fully naked woman before; the closest I’d come was a topless Teresa beside the faux basilica. I watched helplessly as the girl slipped out of the room.
“So what do you do for a living? Your dad said you teach meditation and yoga,” I said.
“Pretty much.”
“What happened to college? You were so smart.”
“I have a high IQ. The score that is designated smart. My dad thinks I should be a doctor. It’s all so mediocre.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Live, man. Just live.”
“I’m skipping college for now as well. I shelve books at the town library. Someday they’re going to make me a checkout person. I’ll carry a little rubber date stamp in a leather pouch on my belt.”
He laughed. “What you do isn’t who you are.”
I looked around the room some more. A framed picture of an Indian guru drenched in garlands and serenity adorned one wall.
“My teacher,” Darius said.
“Your dad’s not a very good shrink.”
“He means well, but he’s too attached to people’s suffering.”
“What do you mean?”
“They come to him and tell him stories about their suffering. It’s not real. Our birthright is twenty-four-seven bliss. Suffering is ignorance. Psychotherapy is like rearranging the furniture in a burning house. You’ve got to get to the source of the problem.”
“The source,” I repeated.
“Forgetting what we already know. That’s the source of the problem.” He massaged the arch of one foot with both hands.
“I know lots of things. Not many of them matter,” I said.
“What matters is the knower. The witness of the knowledge. That’s why IQ is so bogus. The real you is the silent witness of all that crap.”
“Where’d you learn this?”
“Here and there.”
“So, what, you’ve discovered God or something?”
“God is just a level of consciousness. I’m looking for unity. Where individual identity stops.” His face was so earnest that I had to look out the window.
“I better be going. I don’t know why I came. It was kind of ridiculous.”
“Why don’t you stay a
while? We’re having a gathering this afternoon.”
“A gathering?”
Out in the hallway the freckle-faced woman sang on her way to the shower. Her voice had a childlike quality to it, a high and clear resonance.
“Yeah. I’d like that.”
People drove up from Madison in an old school bus, a mural of peasant liberation painted on the side. A drumming circle started up behind the house after lunch; a girl with dreadlocks shimmied in the middle of it, the air shattered by African rhythms, 5/8 beats, strange algorithms of primal music. Bearded men sat in a hot tub with topless women; a bonfire blazed under an old oak. I moved through the crowd, trying to find safety. Part of me wanted to leave, but I also felt the pull of the night’s excess. As the air was mauled by the sweet-fungal smell of cannabis, and a hookah pipe the size of a house cat fumed from the front porch, I felt a real desire to look into people’s faces, to make contact.
I tried to move inconspicuously, to appear relaxed and hip. I settled between the teepee and the hot tub, under a planting of birch trees. I watched Darius, now Taro, move through the crowd: what had started as needle-voiced intelligence and lifeless gestures in grade school had developed into a kind of charisma in early adulthood—the dead-rock gait of the unhurried. At nineteen, he was exactly where he wanted to be in life.
After several hours, the drumbeat had become a kind of pedantic refrain, slurring its way across the blackberry rambles. A dozen people lay passed out on the grass and in rocking chairs on the front porch. A man and a woman were having slow, meditative sex under a tree. I heard the woman let out a low moan, like she was easing herself into a hot bath. Sex remained a mystery—there were still forces in the universe waiting to gather me up. Darius didn’t drink or smoke. He held court with a clutch of serious-looking Marxists from Madison, including a guy with a Chairman Mao cap. I made my way to the porch to say good-bye. The freckle-faced girl appeared beside me, swaying to the listless beat.
“You’re not leaving, are you?” she said, touching my arm.
“Afraid so.”
“Have a hit before you leave.”
I looked at the hookah pipe—a brass dragon spewing smoke.
“It might kill me,” I said.
“It might save you.”
The Beautiful Miscellaneous Page 24