The Inventors

by Peter Selgin

  You were less mature than others your age. Your friend Christopher was much more mature than you. He was always helping people, Christopher, especially old ladies like Clara, his neighbor across the street, shoveling her sidewalk and bringing her string bean casseroles that his mother baked. Unlike you and your brother, Christopher was a Cub Scout. You’d see him in his blue uniform edged with yellow piping and festooned with badges and medals. He went to church every Sunday, made his bed, and picked up after litterbugs.

  On the table in his waiting room Dr. Randolph, your pediatrician, kept old issues of a magazine for children called Highlights that featured a cartoon strip entitled Goofus & Gallant. It contrasted the behaviors of its eponymous duo, showing each responding to similar situations, with Gallant exemplifying kindness and generosity and Goofus being selfish and irresponsible. Goofus takes the last apple. Gallant shares his orange … Gallant was a pussy; Goofus was a dick. You were Goofus.

  THOUGH FOR YEARS you’d been hearing whispers and rumors about it, you’d only recently discovered sex for yourself. You kept a so-called “girlie” magazine, the kind dignified by the phrase artist’s models and packed with black-and-white photographs of naked, large-breasted women gazing into the camera lens, rolled up in a tube and hidden in the crags of a stone wall in the woods behind your home. When the mood struck, you’d go up there and – with some difficulty, since you wouldn’t always recall where you last hid it – find the magazine, a little worse for wear than last time, its pages stuck together with dampness and mold so you had to peel them gingerly apart to get at your favorite photograph, the full-page one of the dark-haired lady making a “come-hither” gesture with her right hand while running her tongue over her lips. You’d convey the magazine to the nearest shady patch of moss (made for the purpose, so it seemed) and stand there, all alone in the woods with your dungarees down around your ankles and dappled sunlight filtered through the overhead branches. As you held the magazine with one hand and your dick in the other with the thrust of rushing rivers all the dark splendid forces of nature converged, the primitive mysterious forces of life: they were at your command, merging, mounting, flaring, drawing everything around you – trees and rocks, moss and lichen, ferns, insects, birds, air – into a vortex that spread outward, absorbing the woods and hills, the neighborhood, the town, streets, buildings, houses, hat factories, churches … spreading its whirlpool arms wide to embrace the Milky Way and all of the other galaxies, the whole universe, everything sucked into a churning maelstrom as you stood with your head thrown back and your breath catching in your throat holding back the urge to scream. Then, before you knew it, it was over, the wave crested, its energy expended, its remnant force backing off, until nothing remained but you standing alone there in the woods on the side of the hill with your pants down around your ankles, the universe a wad of limp flesh in your tired, wet hand.

  Afterward you’d hike to the top of the hill and, as fast as you could, run down it through the woods, leaping gazelle-like over rocks and tree trunks, all the way back to the house, your feet barely touching the ground. Except for in your dreams this was as close as you’d come to flying. By some miracle you didn’t break your neck.

  YOU WERE AS seductive as you were easily seduced, especially by the surfaces of things. Certain colors and textures you found irresistible. Anything vermilion, golden-yellow, or striped. Your superficial fascinations made it hard for you to grasp things on a deeper, more intellectual level. You cultivated these superficial captivations, turning them into drawings, charming others with them as you had been charmed. The moment you presented Mrs. Decker, your kindergarten teacher, with a drawing of the Queen Elizabeth or the Empire State Building, and she gave you a kiss, you learned the value not only of art, but of seduction.

  You were vain, selfish, cunning, impudent, brash, sullen, sneaky, earnest, charming, naïve, lazy, impatient, sweet, sarcastic, and shy. You were not yet intense, obsessive, depressive, nostalgic, melancholy, regretful, arrogant, or an insomniac.

  You were an invention in progress.

  * * *

  MOST OF WHAT YOU LEARNED FROM THE NEW TEACHER he taught you outside of the classroom, during your visits and your walks together. There were the things that you talked about, big things: books, music, science, politics, education, art. Never anything petty or humdrum. Even when you spoke of ordinary things, discussing them with the teacher made them seem extraordinary. Though the teacher’s subject was English, like your father, he knew a little about everything. For sure he knew much more than you did.

  Again, you would not remember the details of your discussions. The details didn’t matter. What mattered were the quality of the exchanges themselves, the atmosphere of reverent silence imbued with the smoky smell of Chinese tea and the sounds of burning wood snapping in the stove, these along with the gestures and facial expressions of the teacher, which must have persuaded you as much or more than his ideas.

  For weren’t you so engrossed by the teacher that you’d have been held spellbound by anything he said? Had he not become for you a sort of an oracle, a fount of wisdom, one so ornately beautiful you’d have drunk from its waters even knowing that they were bitter or polluted or poisoned? In the end, what he said mattered much less than his having said it. And what mattered even more was how, when not speaking, the teacher listened to you. It was his listening after all that held you in such thrall. To every word of his listening you clung for dear life.

  And though your genius papa knew even more than the teacher did, the teacher was easier to talk to and with. He was much more tolerant of your ignorance.

  Then there were the things that you didn’t talk about, the knowledge, wisdom, and insights that you absorbed from the teacher as if through osmosis while sitting or walking together in silence. Looking back, it would seem to you that you’d learned as much from those silences as from your talks. That two people could exist in a state of mutual contented silence was a revelation to you.

  THANKS TO THE new teacher you developed the habit of reading. Before you hadn’t been that well read. In fact you hardly read at all. With their hundreds of pages tightly packed with words, books intimidated you. It seemed impossible if not absurd to you that anyone could read – let alone write – a whole book.

  For being so intimidated by books you blamed your parents, who never read to you. Your mother couldn’t; her English wasn’t good enough. As for your father, he couldn’t be bothered. Anyway he disliked books in English, preferring those in other languages, especially German. They lined the shelves of the bookcase your father kept in the back room of the Building, the one with the trundle bed.

  Thanks mainly to the foreign books on those shelves, you had come to think of all books as repositories of cunningly encrypted code, and concluded that they all, without exception, were incomprehensible.

  This may explain why, seeing all those books jammed into the jerry-rigged shelves of the teacher’s cottage, you experienced something like what a small renegade republic must feel when confronted by the collective armies of an axis of powerful nations, their batteries loaded and trained upon your woeful ignorance. You couldn’t decide whether to surrender or run. Instead, you asked the teacher if you could borrow one of his books.

  Help yourself, the teacher said. Only remember: when somebody lends you a book they’re letting you borrow a piece of their soul. Please be sure to return it.

  You chose a slim paperback. With its yellow text on a lush green background – a splash of sunlight on moss – the cover appealed to you. The book’s opening paragraph struck a decidedly non-threatening note:

  Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was this moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…

  THE WALLS OF the bedroom where you slept with your brother (twin brothers in twin twin beds) were painted chalky blue. On one wall was a painting your mother had done of a rabbit, on another a simila
r painting by her of a donkey. The curtains were a deeper blue than the walls, printed with steamship luggage tags and other tokens of travel to foreign destinations: Reno, Cannes, Lido, Waikiki, Amsterdam, St. Moritz, Paris.… Until you were ten years old, when your mother took you and your brother to Italy, those curtains did all of your traveling for you, stirred by the winds of the ceiling fan at the top of the stairs over the linen closet.

  To the sound of the fan thrumming away through hot summer nights you conjured a mythical creature – part eagle, part lion, part dragon – living behind its folding louvers. The fan was controlled by a timer switch your father rigged up with a pulley for a dial, tucked under towels in the linen closet. That the switch was strictly off-limits didn’t stop you from tiptoeing to the linen closet in the middle of the night in your pajamas and giving the pulley a solid twist so the blue curtains would billow and the fan would thrum all night long, obscuring the rasps of crickets there to tell you how very hot and muggy it was.

  That muggy September night, curled up in your bed with the lamp glowing and the blue curtains billowing and the ceiling fan thrumming, you read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or tried to. Within three pages your eyes went bleary. The paragraphs turned into rectangular swarms of gnats. Before long a raft like the Kon-Tiki arrived to float you and your illiterate dreams downstream to the Land of Nod.

  Subsequent books met with similar results, with you asleep within three pages.

  Over time, though, the word swarms flew in orderly fashion into your brain, which made sense out of them. Words formed sentences, sentences melded into meaning, and ideas, images, characters and events sprouted from the pages like vegetables in a garden. Thus the reader in you was born.

  ONE OF THE books you borrowed from the teacher’s shelf was a novel by Hermann Hesse called Magister Ludi or The Glass Bead Game. Set in the twenty-fifth century, the story centers on an austere order of secular scholars who, while running a boarding school for boys, engage in a draconian intellectual game whose rules are deliberately obscure and whose devotees live in a segregated community in the province of Castalia known as Waldzell.

  Joseph Knecht, the main character, is the order’s most distinguished member, the most accomplished player of the game. Convinced that Castalia has become an ivory tower cut off from the problems of those who live beyond its hermetic borders, Knecht resigns his post as Magister Ludi and renounces his cloistered existence to tutor a boy named Tito, the son of a friend. Days into his new vocation, while swimming with Tito, Knecht drowns in a mountain lake.

  The name Castalia, you learned, comes from Greek mythology. It’s the name of the nymph Apollo transformed into the fountain at the base of Mount Parnassos at Delphi. According to the myth, anyone who drank from the fountain or listened to the music of its flowing waters would be transformed into a poet.

  The teacher’s carriage house was your Castalia. The chessboard and its pieces were your Glass Bead Game. The teacher was Magister Ludi, Master of the Game. And you were Tito, his tutee, the dynamic and strong-willed boy.

  WE DON’T SEE OURSELVES AS WE ARE BUT AS WE WERE or wish to be or as we fear becoming. The image in the mirror is a distortion – an amalgam of dreams, nightmares, nostalgia, fantasies, ideals, worries, and assumptions. Even photographs aren’t objective, since they offer only the thinnest slice of a moment in time, one assailed by shadows or harsh light, fleeting expressions and moods, colored in all sorts of ways first by the camera, then by the viewer – “a subjective and mood-filtered eye.”

  There is no objectivity; or there is, but it’s an illusion.

  I can’t tell you who I am, only who I think I am.

  * * *

  IN A DRAWER OF THE FILING CABINET IN MY LOFT there’s a cardboard portfolio jammed with photographs. One shows my twin brother and me walking on a trail through the woods at Huntington State Park, in Redding, Connecticut. The trail is strewn with yellow leaves. The photo was probably taken the year our father died, around Thanksgiving.

  I’m wearing a brown plaid flannel shirt with the tails untucked over blue jeans; George wears a green linen shirt and white chinos. He walks a few yards ahead of me, arms flung out, head lowered. He’s laughing – at something I’ve said or one of his own jokes. I look more serious, my eyes downcast, my mouth parted in speech, uttering – or having just uttered – the witticism at which my brother laughs, or a repartee to his witticism. Making each other laugh was something George and I did a lot. Even when not in the same room or even in the same part of the world, we could make each other laugh. We’d wake up laughing at something the other said in a dream. It happens to this day.

  In the snapshot George has a few pounds on me. He always did. He was always bigger, more robust. From the beginning, through the birth canal, George took the lead, born two minutes earlier, my older brother.

  United States Patent # 3,518,441.“OPTICAL GAUGE FOR MEASURING THE THICKNESS OF A CONTINUOUS WEB,” Filed January 24, 1968.

  VI.

  My Brother, My Prototype

  Love is assuming the other’s burden of fate.

  HERMANN BROCH

  IN TIME YOUR VISITS WITH THE TEACHER AT HIS COTTAGE became routine. From them you would arrive home to find your brother in the bedroom you shared, reading a book or listening to his latest Columbia Records Club purchase – to Phil Ochs, the Beach Boys, Schubert.

  George wouldn’t ask where you’d been. He knew. And you wouldn’t say, since it would only have inflamed his jealousy. And you knew that your brother was jealous. You were glad of it. It pleased you to have something your twin didn’t have, something you weren’t forced to share.

  One problem with being a twin: you had to share everything. Your birthday, your bedroom, your books, your toys, your looks, your friends, the love and affection of your parents (who treated you, annoyingly, as equals). While others were free to shape their own distinct destinies, as a twin yours was cut out for you in the shape of a sibling.

  On the windowsill in her corner room Nonnie kept a miniature version of the Capitoline Wolf, the bronze Etruscan sculpture of a she-wolf suckling the infant twins Romulus and Remus, mythological founders of Rome. With you or your brother in her room she’d point to them one at a time and say, Questo e Giorgio, e quello li Pierino.

  * * *

  YOUR MOTHER HADN’T EXPECTED TWINS. SHE ONLY found out after you were born. When the gynecologist put his stethoscope to your mother’s chest, he heard what he assumed was one heartbeat, but was really two hearts beating in unison.

  Having no names prepared for two children, while our mother recovered from the anesthesia they’d given her for the cesarean section the hospital authorities named you Selgin Boys A and B. You were Boy B.

  And though no tests were ever performed to determine zygosity, your mother always insisted that you weren’t identical, that your bodies were formed from separately fertilized eggs. Still you shared the same rare blood type (A-), and until you were well into your teens most people couldn’t tell you apart.

  You also fought. Some twins bond, meeting life’s challenges in joyful tandem, like the tennis playing twins in the old Doublemint chewing gum commercials. Not you and George. You both hated being lumped together, bound in a perpetual three-legged race with this other person who happened to share your looks and last name. As far as both of you were concerned, being a twin was no bounty. On the contrary, it was a handicap tantamount to being born with a clubfoot.

  At times your rivalry felt ageless. It wouldn’t have surprised you to learn that you and your twin brother had kicked, punched, and insulted each other in the womb. Your entry into the oxygenated world only fanned the flames of antipathy, with taunts turning to fists and projectiles and ending, more often than not, in a visit to the emergency room or Dr. Randolph’s office for stitches or butterfly enclosures.

  As you grew the fights only got worse, with frequent forays into the public sphere. When you were twelve, at a backyard party at Karen Finklestein’s box
y little house at the end of a cul-de-sac, as the other guests formed a circle and egged you on, you and your brother wrestled each other down a weedy embankment into a shadowy stand of pine trees. When it was over – as the others looked on, laughing – you and your twin emerged basted in blood, tears, and snot, coated with pine needles.

  This inspired a recurrent nightmare. In it you found yourself looking up at a circle of faces laughing, pointing, and jeering at you as you lay on the ground, having presumably fought a pitched battle with your twin, only in the dream your twin is nowhere to be seen, the inescapable conclusion being that you’ve just beaten the crap out of yourself. It was like beating up – or being beaten up by – your own reflection.

  GEORGE DID EVERYTHING first. He was the first to collect minerals and postage stamps, the first to read books, the first to embrace what became your favorite TV shows, The Wild, Wild West, Diver Dan, Flipper, Sea Hunt, The Aquanauts, any television show featuring water or scuba divers.

  The Aquanauts was George’s favorite. Unlike Rick Nelson in Sea Hunt, who used an old-style, double-hosed regulator, the star of The Aquanauts used a modern, single-hose job. From when he was six, your twin dreamed of being one of Jacques Cousteau’s divers on the Calypso. While watching The Aquanauts he’d wear a pair of pretend scuba tanks your mother made from twin empty aerosol cans. With the spray cans attached to his back with a harness George would scuba dive on the living room floor.