by Peter Selgin
When do you plan to leave?
Soon as possible. Frankly – and this is no reflection on you or our friendship, you understand – but I can’t bear to be here much longer. I’ve come to detest this miserable backwater and everything it stands for. Fucking narrow-minded people. They and people like them ruin everything. Give them paradise and they turn it into a shithole. What they can’t join or enjoy they destroy or try their best to. Fuck them! If I leave tomorrow it won’t be a day too soon. I’ve already tendered my resignation. Anyway, for your sake it’s probably better for me to leave sooner rather than later.
The two crows stopped cawing.
You thought for a moment before you said:
What if I went with you?
The teacher smiled.
I’m not kidding. I’ve never been to Japan.
I doubt your parents would approve.
That’s their problem.
Come on, Peter.
What the hell do I need to stay here for?
You’re fourteen.
So what? What does my age have to do with it?
It has everything to do with it.
Besides, after you’re gone, I’ll still be stuck in that box.
There won’t be any box. Not after I’m gone.
How do you know?
I know.
It’s not fair, you said.
We’ll still be friends. I give you my word on that. I’ll write to you. And as soon as we can we’ll see each other again. You’ll see. It won’t be so bad. Anyway it’s the best solution I can offer.
It isn’t fair, you said.
Peter, please –
It isn’t, dammit!
Don’t be childish.
You stood up and shouted at the two crows:
It isn’t fair! It isn’t fair! It isn’t fucking fair!
The crows flew off.
The Prior Art
United States Patent No. 2,541,107: LOW-CLEARANCE ANTENNA. “This device relates to high frequency antennae and particularly to an antenna for radiating a vertically polarized wave substantially uniformly in all horizontal directions.” April 12, 1947.
There is only one problem in the world. How does one burst the pupa and metamorphose into a butterfly?
THOMAS MANN
AN INDIAN BOY APPROACHES HIS GURU, WHO SITS IN A forest examining a small object in his hand. Asked what the object is, the guru answers:
It’s called a chrysalis and holds an incipient butterfly. In time it will split apart and the butterfly will burst forth on beautiful wings.
The boy asks the guru if he may have it.
Yes, says the guru, under one condition: you must promise that when the butterfly beats its wings against the chrysalis to make it split open, you will resist helping it. You must let the butterfly emerge on its own.
Having made his assurances, the boy takes the chrysalis home, where he watches it, waiting for it to split open. After a few hours, sure enough the chrysalis begins to quiver. The boy sees the half-formed butterfly beating its wings against it, frantically trying to escape. At last the boy can’t resist any longer. He breaks open the chrysalis. The butterfly staggers out, falls to the ground, and dies.
Carrying the dead butterfly, with tears in his eyes the boy returns to his guru.
You broke your promise, didn’t you? the guru says.
The boy nods. The guru explains:
By beating its wings against the chrysalis the latent butterfly strengthens its muscles, making it possible for him to fly. By helping it as you did you doomed it.
“Fig. 2 is a diagrammatic representation of another embodiment of the invention employing a specific form of electron beam and an electron multiplier.” U.S. Patent #2,459,724, ASTATIC CATHODE-RAY TUBE, Application November 27, 1946, Serial No. 712,566
XII.
If Ever I Would Leave You
Bethel, Connecticut, 1971 – 1975
THE SUMMER AFTER THE TEACHER LEFT, YOU HELPED your father with one of his inventions. It had been commissioned by the famous dungaree manufacturer Levi Strauss & Co. to measure the number of flaws per inch in bolts of denim fabric. The four-foot wide bolts were fed on a conveyor of chains and rollers through a bed of solar cells that responded electronically to shifts in color, thickness, and light too subtle for human eyes to detect.
Like the Shoe Sole Machine, this was one of your father’s bigger and more ambitious inventions. It took up the entire vestibule – the same vestibule that once housed a five-foot long black snake. According to U.S. Patent Number 3,841,761, the machine’s official designation was “Apparatus for Detecting Faults in Denim Fabric,” but you and your father both called it the “The Blue Jean Machine.”
You painted aluminum and sheet metal panels with steel blue and center-punched or scored them for the drill press, the band saw, the bending machine. You drilled, filed, sanded, screwed, bolted, and soldered. Together you and your father watched the Blue Jean Machine grow into a staunch mechanical dinosaur, a stegosaurus of metal and circuitry squatting there in the vestibule, waiting to be fed its bolts of rugged blue denim.
When neighborhood kids came by for a visit you’d point to it and say, Here’s what my father and I have been working on lately, as if you’d had a hand not only in executing but in conceiving the contraption.
Working alongside him in his decrepit laboratory that summer, you never felt closer to your inventor papa. When he showed you how to work the drill press or the band saw, you felt the warm roughness of his hand guiding yours. The Building’s smells (of orange peels, scorched metal, and solder flux) became your smells; its sounds (of radio static, buzzing fluorescent tubes, and your father’s curses and farts) became your sounds. The same metal-filing enriched blood ran through your two sets of veins, to where you almost believed that, catching a glimpse of yourself in a mirror, you’d see not your own face but your father’s, with its sloped forehead, its strands of gray hair, its curious large deep-set eyes, its blissfully stretched smile.
A MONTH PASSED with no word from the teacher. Then two, three, six months. … A year. You wondered if you’d ever hear from him again. Every day that passed without a letter from the teacher was a blow that left you bruised inside. You tried not to think about it. Another part of you, a deeper stronger part that didn’t bruise as easily, was sure not only that you’d get a letter but that you’d see him again. It was just a matter of time.
One summer Sunday, as you were fixing the chain on your bicycle, a rusting green convertible Karmann Ghia came up the steep driveway. You stood there watching as a man stepped out of the car.
At first you didn’t recognize the teacher. He’d grown a long beard and wore a plaid shirt. He’d lost weight. When you hugged him you could feel the teacher’s ribcage.
You said:
I was starting to think I’d never see you again.
Were you?
Where have you been?
That’s a long story.
You could have at least written me, you know.
You’re right, Peter: I could have.
Why didn’t you?
The teacher smiled in that way of his that had the answers but refused, at least for the time being, to share them.
Are your folks around?
Sure. Mom’s inside. My father’s in his lab. Did you want to see them?
I want to see you. Is there someplace we can go?
IN THE TEACHER’S Karmann Ghia you rode to Huntington State Park. The park was named for Collis Potter Huntington, the railroad robber baron whose summer estate it had once been, and whose daughter Anna, the sculptress, also lived and worked there. On the way, the teacher told you about the project he’d undertaken in Boston, where he had settled following his travels, a special high school program he had designed for bright, underprivileged people, mostly young men from Roxbury and other blighted Boston neighborhoods. He explained how – before moving to Boston – he’d lived for a while in Maine, first in Portland and then in Bangor, w
here he met a woman, a painter named Eleanor, with whom he had been romantically involved.
I was all set to marry her, he told you as the Karmann Ghia zipped down a series of winding, leafy roads. I proposed and she accepted. Then the Boston job came up.
So what happened?
We broke the engagement. We couldn’t work things out. Eleanor didn’t want to leave Maine, and I didn’t want to give up the chance to do something more important than anything I’d ever done in my life. It’s not every day you get the chance to set up a small alternative high school in the ghetto of a major city. I begged her to come with me, but I knew it was hopeless. We both knew it. Having dedicated your whole life to painting trees, you don’t pick up and move to Dorchester, Massachusetts. So we broke it off. It really blew my circuits. I’ve never been more depressed. I felt like killing myself.
I’m glad you didn’t.
So am I.
The car’s roof was open; the wind blew the teacher’s hair and yours.
What about you? Have you been seeing anyone?
You considered filling the teacher in on your love life, which to date consisted of dry-humping Karen Brigsby on the grassy summit of Eagle Cliff. But that didn’t seem very romantic. You shrugged and said:
No one special.
What about Vivian? Have you been seeing much of her?
Not much, you answered. In fact you hadn’t seen Vivian at all. When not working with your father in the Building you’d spent most of the summer with George and your mutual friends, riding your bicycles, hiking, and swimming at Huntington’s. When not doing those things, you spent most of your time alone in your basement room, drawing in a sketchbook, or in the backyard, doing curls, bench presses, and Navy lifts with a rusty set of barbells that a friend (who never used them) gave you. Whenever you used them (in a determined effort to expunge the scrawniness from muscles that hadn’t yet gotten the news that you were a man), the barbells sounded like an antique printing press.
At fifteen your arms were more muscular. Your neck was thicker, your shoulders were broader. You’d grown an inch. You dressed differently, too. You’d traded your pointy cowboy boots for square-toed Frye boots. You wore turtlenecks or cable-knit sweaters over crisp bell-bottoms, the front pockets of which you’d hook your thumbs into when you walked as the teacher had walked, with long determined strides and a pigeon-like forward thrust of your head. It never occurred to you that your imitation of the teacher was obvious. Or maybe it did, but you didn’t care.
THE TEACHER PARKED the Karmann Ghia by the service road. From there you walked into the park. It was a gypsy moth plague year. Through the spring their ghostly tents had sprung up all over the woods. When summer arrived, swarms of black inchworms burst out of them to munch their way through the forests, turning verdant hills smoke gray as the worms stripped them bare. On perfectly cloudless days the worms’ droppings made a sound exactly like falling rain.
You hiked off the main trail to the swimming rock, a large rock brooding over the water, where, without hesitation or shame, you took off your clothes and skinny-dipped out to a small island with a stone decorative lighthouse on it, your feet kicking up white plumes of water. You took turns climbing and jumping off the lighthouse. Afterward you lay stretched out on a smooth stone at its base, catching your breaths, drying under the sun’s warm rays.
The sun sure feels good, you said as you lay there.
As thermonuclear devices go it has its charms, said the teacher.
You lay that way for some time, your eyes closed, listening to each other’s breaths and to bird songs and the wind sighing through tree branches, the sun painting brilliant masterpieces on your eyelids. In the silence you heard another sound: the gentle rain of caterpillar droppings.
So how come you didn’t write to me? you asked.
I wanted to, Peter. Believe me, I did. There were times when I had to fight back the urge to pick up a pen or the telephone.
What stopped you?
Time, said the teacher. I wanted to give you time. I felt you needed it.
Time for what?
Time to grow, to become the person you are now.
You let this sink in, or tried to.
How would your writing to me have stopped that?
I’m not sure it would have. It might not have made any difference. But I didn’t want to take any chances.
You nodded though you still didn’t understand.
Maybe I should have written, said the teacher. Maybe it was presumptuous of me to assume that I was that important to you. What’s important for you to know is that I was thinking less of myself than of you, Peter, wanting what was best for you. One thing I did know for sure, and that’s that I didn’t want to risk interfering in any way with your process of growing up. I’d done that already and regretted it.
What did you do?
I pushed you all too hard and fast. All of you, but especially you.
So? What harm did it do?
Perhaps a metaphor will help, the teacher said. And then he told you the story about the guru, his disciple, and the butterfly. Now do you understand? he asked.
I wasn’t a caterpillar, and I’m not a butterfly.
No, but you were a boy and now you’re a man. Anyway, whether or not I made the right decision in not writing you, I never for a moment doubted that we’d see each other again. I didn’t mean for you to doubt it either, but I can understand why you did. And for that I’m sorry.
You went on talking then, both of you, the teacher’s whispers joining the sounds of wind and birds and caterpillar droppings as he told you more about the work he’d been doing, and some projects he hoped to take up in the future, including his wish to create some sort of community where thoughtful, intelligent, caring, and talented people from all parts of the world and walks of life could come together to teach, learn, and live.
That’s been my long-held dream, the teacher said.
You mean like a school?
More than school, a community. A place where people wouldn’t just come to teach and learn, but to live and grow, to nurture and help each other in other ways. And just to be together and give each other support and strength.
So there’d be a campus and buildings and all that stuff?
Sure, there’d be a building or buildings. And stuff. Gardens, fields. Barns for animals. A research laboratory. A theater. A yoga center. Who knows?
Sounds pretty ambitious.
It is – but why think small?
Where would you build it?
I’m not sure. As far from all the bullshit as possible.
It’s gonna cost a lot of money, it sounds like.
That it will.
Where will you get it – the money?
The teacher shrugged. I don’t know. I haven’t gotten to that yet. All I know is that there are a lot of people in the world who would be willing to help, who still know how to think and dream, who still have ideals. People like you and me. Some of these people have money or access to it – lots of it. And there’s plenty of land available, unexploited land, some of it not terribly expensive. With perseverance and patience it can be done. Especially patience. Which is why I don’t intend to rush things.
When do you plan to start?
When the time is right. The first step will be to find the right piece of land. I’ve already done a bit of research. I’m leaning toward the west coast, specifically the Pacific Northwest. The climate there’s a lot gentler than it is here in the east. It rains a lot, but it’s a gentle, relaxing rain. And there’s plenty of undeveloped property. There’s also a much more progressive culture out there. I hope to get out there soon to do some exploring. In the next year or two.
I’d like to be part of it, you said.
You will be. Don’t worry.
YOU WERE HEADED back to the teacher’s car when a mosquito landed on his arm.
Here, watch this, he said.
You watched as the teacher clenched the muscles of his fore
arm, trapping the mosquito as it sucked his blood. The mosquito’s body filled with blood, growing bigger and bigger. At last it exploded, shooting a thin streak of blood across the teacher’s forearm.
That’s what happens, said the teacher as he wiped the blood away, when you hold on too long.
* * *
TWO MONTHS LATER, YOU RECEIVED THE FIRST OF MANY letters from the teacher. It arrived in a square envelope with a Boston, Massachusetts, postmark, written in neat blue handwriting on a stationary card with a drawing of a boy gazing out at a sailboat sailing against a landscape of snow-peaked mountains.
Summer has come to an end and winter is just around the corner. Among a few select and dear human beings you lie heavily on my mind today. A mixture of frustration (the distance) and impatience (the time until) temper my thoughts.…
Over the next few years many more letters followed, some on thin blue airmail stationary, some from as far away as India and Japan. They arrived at unpredictable intervals and never when you expected them. Months passed with no letters at all, then two would arrive in the same month.
… I’m finally back on my feet, recovered from travels and illness, moving slowly but with confidence toward the long cherished dream of starting a community, a place where people like us can live and work and teach together. The time is not yet ripe. Still, events seem to be heading toward the proper conditions.
Some of the letters were adorned with grace notes: a scrap of a dried chamomile flower pasted into a margin, a watercolor sketch of a backpacking hiker with walking stick, a sketch of a pine tree in green felt marker.
I’m amazed at the amount of pent-up emotion your letters project. I also get the feeling you’re relentless with yourself. My first instinct is to wish you were here, to calm you down a bit and sooth away some of the loneliness by sharing. It’s my further feeling that you’ve yet to experience an all-encompassing love, a relationship physical, emotional, and intellectual that empties you, letting some peace settle in.