by Peter Selgin
I want to be known; I want to understand myself and be understood. There seems to be some shame connected with this, some tacit agreement among humans that the baring of souls in the form of the written word is disagreeable, that if it must be done at all it should be done discretely, as “literature,” under the guise of poetry or fiction, and not – unless the author can claim victimhood or fame – in the form of a memoir. Public and private selves are to be kept distinct.
To that I say, “pooh!”
Here is where I’ve come from, who I’ve been, what I was. What you, dear Past Self, underwent on the way to becoming me.
NULL TYPE COMPARISON REFLECTOMETER. Figure 4, “A diagrammatic view of an alternate embodiment of the present invention.”
XVII.
Corvallis, Oregon, 1980
AT DAWN A ROOSTER WAKES YOU. A BLANKET OF MIST covers the hop field. Low clouds press down on the mountains. You get up, strap on your backpack, pick up your guitar, and recross the street. As you do, you remember your father saying to you shortly before you left on your journey, Do you know what I think, Peter, my boy? I think you’re overdrawn. Overdrawn – do you know what I mean by that?
In the gray dawn the house is still dark. The light no longer flickers in the window. A Toyota station wagon sits in the driveway.
As you approach the front door you see a cardboard sign posted next to it:
NO SALESMEN OR SOLICITORS
You wonder: Does that mean me? Am I a salesman? A solicitor? Have I come here to sell something?
The cuffs of your jean jacket are stiff with grime. Your face is shadowed with stubble. You haven’t shaved in two weeks, haven’t bathed in six days, haven’t slept in three. Your hair is matted and greasy. Your fingernails are untrimmed and black with grunge. You look like a bum. A bum, did I hear you say? …
The rooster keeps crowing. In the distance a dog barks. You close your eyes and, before you can change your mind, knock on the door.
A minute passes. You think, Maybe it’s the wrong house. In the wrong town. In the wrong state. On the wrong planet. In the wrong solar system. In the wrong galaxy.
Footsteps. The door opens.
In a robe and slippers, your former teacher stands there. He hasn’t changed, not all that much. His hair is still long, with a few gray strands mixed in with the blond. It’s pulled back into a ponytail. He’s still thin – as thin as when you last saw each other. The beard is gone. A varicose vein in the shape of a spider rests on one side of his nose, which has deep gouges from the round glasses he still wears. The thin scar still runs down one side of his face.
He gathers you in, looks you up and down.
Is that a guitar case you’re holding?
You nod. He smiles faintly.
So you’re a musician now?
Nah, I just play a little. You know. I’ve written a few songs.
I see. How did you find out where I live?
Before you answer he says:
Never mind. We can discuss that later. Come in.
THE TEACHER ASKS you about your travels. As you sketch in some of the highlights, he puts a finger to his lips and asks you to please keep your voice down.
My roommate, Curtis, is studying for his exams, he says, pointing to a door with an orange slice of light under it. I wrote to you about Curtis, I think. Didn’t I?
Yeah, you say. You mentioned him in one of your letters.
The teacher escorts you into the kitchen, where shelves sag under dozens of Mason jars. Grains, seeds, flours, honey, dried fruits, nuts, spices, and curry powders. The jars remind you of the parts bins in your father’s laboratory, while the names on the labels – dakkah, couscous, xahtar – transport you to a Moroccan bazaar in which turbaned, bare-assed snake charmers gather around fuming, multi-piped hookahs.
The teacher asks if you’re hungry. He offers you a seat at his kitchen table. Over a bowl of Shredded Wheat, he spoons some Brown Cow yogurt. Would you care for some strawberries? They’re local, from the co-op. You shake your head. You’re too tired to eat, too tired and too disheartened by the unanticipated coolness of this reception. Then again it’s not as though you were invited.
Your eyes, meanwhile, focus on particulars: the string tying a sack of oats, a cobalt blue bottle – one you and the teacher found together? – in the windowsill, the hiss of oil lamps supplementing the feeble daylight seeping in from outdoors.
The house has no electricity or phone, the teacher explains with proud defiance. We told Ma Bell to go screw. We grow our own vegetables. Tomatoes, zucchini, lettuce, cabbage, onions, broccoli, Brussels sprouts. We’ve just planted a cornfield, a small one. We have a root cellar. What we don’t grow, we buy at the co-op. Everything’s recycled or recyclable. Our goal is to be as self-sustaining as possible. As he speaks, you notice him eyeing your grimy fingernails. … like you’ve been scratching your ass all day.
He hands you a freshly laid egg. One of our hens just laid that, he says.
That explains it, you say.
What? What does it explain?
That rooster I heard this morning.
You don’t need a rooster for eggs.
You don’t?
No.
Huh. I always thought –
Please. The teacher puts a finger to his lips. I have to ask you again to please lower your voice. Curtis …
Oh, right. Sorry, you say.
YOU SIT AND talk. The teacher fills you in on his doctoral program that he describes as a “procrustean bed of sadistic design.” Swallow, regurgitate, swallow, says the teacher. That’s what we’ve been up to for the last six months. It’s been a living hell for both of us. It’s why I’ve been out of touch. One of the reasons.
As busy as he and Curtis have been with their doctoral studies, he explains, whispering, they’ve even busier with volunteer work, helping indigenous peoples – Native Americans from local tribes, and also boat people, refugees from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Ever since the Fall of Saigon, he whispers as you eat the yogurt and Shredded Wheat, they’ve been coming in droves in crowded leaky boats, surviving storms, starvation, diseases, and pirates, seeking asylum. For every thousand refugees who make it, a hundred or more die. And it’s just the beginning.
The teacher goes on to explain that President Carter recently signed a bill providing for the permanent systematic resettlement of the boat people in the United States. The trickle is about to become a flood, he says. We’re talking tens of thousands of refugees per month. And every one of them is going to need help.
You nod. You’ve heard news stories about the boat people but haven’t paid much attention. You’ve been too busy trying to be an artist, so you tell yourself, when really what you’ve been doing is paying lip service to various artistic pursuits while awaiting the deus ex machina of your inevitable glorious destiny. A cesspool of shame backs up and overflows in you.
Finish your yogurt, the teacher says. Then I’ll show you to your room.
THE BED IS covered by a rainbow-hued serape – the same serape that covered the bed in the teacher’s cottage in Bethel. The books on the shelves look familiar, too. Vonnegut, Hesse, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A shelf under the window holds several small wooden boxes and a blue glass telegraph line insulator.
You pick up the insulator, hold it, smile.
That’s a telegraph line insulator, the teacher says.
I know, you say. We used to collect them. Remember?
Did we?
Don’t you remember? Along the train tracks?
The teacher shakes his head.
He explains that he has to work early in the morning. You’re not sure if by work he means the university or something else and don’t ask. So far this visit has been strange enough. You don’t wish to invite more strangeness. What you really want is to sleep.
The teacher shows you the bathroom and the linen closet. He gives you a towel and asks if you need anything else. You shake your head. There’s a spare bicy
cle in the garage, he says, should you need one. The tires may need air. The pump is next to it on the wall. I should be back sometime early this evening. Meanwhile make yourself at home.
He starts to go.
It’s good to see you, you say.
Yes, he says, stopping. It’s good to see you, too. We’ll catch up later.
* * *
ON THE FUTON WITH YOUR CLOTHES ON YOU DREAM that you’re sleeping in the hop field again. In the dream you wake up choking on smoke to find yourself encircled by a ring of fire set by torch-bearing farmers.
Then you’re truly awake, lying there smelling smoke, bathed by the light through a crack in the shade. You look out, expecting flames, but it’s only the harvest moon.
WHEN WE SUBJECT OUR PAST PASSIONS TO SCRUTINY WE break with that part of ourselves that those passions nurtured – human, real, imperfect, radiant with veneration. Objectivity requires us to disown our innocence, to view our youthful ardors with a magnifying glass through which the sun burns a hole in them.
Memoirs like this one presume to speak for the dead, without letting them answer or apologize. At best the result is an invasion of privacy, at worst a very public tribunal – in any case, an utterance too complicated to pass for the simple “truth.”
By forgiving what’s past and done we let ourselves exist; by not forgiving it we limit ourselves to a wounded righteousness. Pinned down in words on paper, the past becomes an affidavit testifying against itself.
In documenting the past we condemn it. By telling this story, making it comprehensible to strangers, or trying to, aren’t I doing just what the teacher warned me about – dragging it down to earth? Am I not exposing a fragile treasure buried and preserved in the muck of memory to oxygen and sunlight – corrosive elements doomed to destroy it? Am I not digging up the bones of people I once adored and – intentionally or not – kicking their teeth in? Can words ever do the past justice?
But words are about all I have, words and this odd device known as memory that thinks it remembers the past, when really it’s inventing it.
“MAGNETIC AND OPTICAL DIFFERENTIAL THICKNESS MEASURING INSTRUMENT.” U.S. Patent No. 3,258,686, June 28, 1966
XVIII.
The Glass Plate Game
Corvallis, Oregon, 1980
THROUGH THE SLATTED BLINDS SUNLIGHT STREAMS IN. Morning? Afternoon? You dress in relatively presentable clothes and step into the kitchen, which is empty. Everyone’s gone.
After putting water on for tea, you pump the bicycle’s tires and pedal into town.
It’s true what they say about never forgetting how to ride a bicycle. A delicious freedom runs like a current from the spinning wheels through the bicycle’s frame, up through the handlebars into your arms and shoulders. In the distance a great cloud of umber smoke billows into the sky. There’s that coffee smell again.
You follow it into town, to a place called the Beanery, where you buy a cup of coffee, then spend a few moments examining the bulletin board, looking at notices for menial jobs (fruit picking, tree topping), yoga, guitar, crystal healing, and Transcendental Meditation classes. Sharing the bulletin board with the help wanted and other notices is a colorful poster for the Oregon Country Fair.
You find a table, sit down, and write in your notebook.
You’ve been sitting there for a while, turning your non-specific happiness into a stream of words, when a very tall bearded dusty man approaches your table and flips a pack of small white cards onto it. He asks you to pick one of the cards. Without giving them so much as a glance you toss the cards back at him.
The man looks at you, perplexed. The fedora that he wears is dusty, as are his dungaree overalls. Every inch of him, you note, is covered with a fine layer of sawdust. He asks you again to please pick a card. Despite his large build and features, as he bends his face into yours the man’s beady myopic eyes gleam with shy vulnerability.
Relenting, you pick a card from the pack. It shows a circle of arrows pointing every which way. Under the circle the words Everything… All.
The man smiles and nods energetically. Good, he says. Very good!
He gestures for you to pick another card. You do. This one has an idealized drawing of a flower with a cross-shaped stem. Shahe: it says, the Perfect Flower.
Ha! says the man, his smile displaying a mouth full of rotting teeth.
The next card shows a G-clef over the word Harmony. The card after that has two stick figures, one standing on a cloud, the other connected to him by puppet strings. Experience, the Teacher.
The next card is illustrated by a serpent swallowing its own tail. It says: Infinity: the Ouroborus.
You play very well, the man says.
I do?
The man’s name, you learn, is Dunbar Aitkens. The game is his invention. He calls it the Glass Plate Game.
There are no set rules, Dunbar explains, nor can one win or lose. Relationships are what matter, the juxtapositions of values and ideas from all disciplines, arts, and sciences: musical, verbal, numerical, visual, kinesthetic …
You see, Dunbar Aitkens explains, the game is actually the embodiment of the eternal idea that underlies every movement of the mind toward universitas litterarum, or universal knowledge. At its core the game comes down to patterning. Our skin shares its vital chemistry with the maple leaf and the moth’s wing. Our bodies share the raw sun’s molecular flow. Our hormones are seawater, our nerves are flashes of lightning. The florets in a sunflower are homologous with the Fibonacci series. Everything exists in juxtaposition. There are no individual ideas or objects in nature, only relationships between them. The cards are just a formality. Theoretically the game should be playable entirely in the imagination.6
The official rules of the Glass Plate Game remind me of the descriptions in my father’s patent applications. From the Glass Plate Game website:
1. In making a statement, a player must use a card with an appropriate idea on it, relating it to another idea-card, and label the new card with the next sequential cube (number side up) and a colored square of the same color as the one related to.
2. In asking a question or making a request a player must speak right after the relation in question (in “Challenge”) and record the challenge by turning the cube labeling the relation so that the “C” side is up. A Challenge must be done in the move following the relevant relation.
3. An idea-card cannot be related to unless it has been “opened”. A card is open if it is labeled and unrelated, or has a sequential cube with the “P” or “O” face up.
4. To open an unlabeled card a player labels it with the next sequential cube and a square of an unused color.
5. To open a card that is labeled and related a player turns the sequential cube to the “P” side (Permit).
6. To open a card that is Challenged a player turns the sequential cube to the “O” (Okay).
7. If a relation is Challenged for triteness and talk of it goes nowhere a second player may turn the relevant cube to the blank side, unlabeling the idea-card.
8. If more than three people are playing then no player may make two consecutive moves; no player may Permit a relation if they labeled either of the idea-cards involved, and no player may Okay a card that they labeled. Starred rules describe moves.
9. Branching is possible. A player makes a statement labeling a card and using a square of an unused color on the new card and on all other cards to be associated.
10. Cards may be labeled any number of times. Cards may be written up anytime and unlabeled cards may be removed anytime.
11. Players may also request a relation be made, by the group or another player, specifying at least one of the idea-cards to be related (this is not a Challenge).
12. The game ends with the “return” symbol labeled without a colored square and opened with “P” or both “C” and “O” by another player.
You ask Dunbar if by any chance his game has something to do with a certain novel by Herman Hesse.
; There’s a close correspondence, Dunbar Aitkens admits.
You spend the rest of the afternoon playing the Glass Plate Game. At dusk, with it tucked in your rear pocket, you pedal back to Goodnight Avenue.
* * *
AN ACRID SMELL OF BURNED RUBBER GREETS YOU AS you walk into the house. The teacher and Curtis stand there. Curtis holds a scorched teakettle.
Oh, shit, you say. I’m sorry. I must have left it on the stove. You must have, says Curtis.
It’s the first time you’ve seen Curtis. He’s about your height, shaggy-haired, wearing a white bathrobe. His lower lip protrudes slightly. His eyes, judging by your standards, are too close together.
He and the teacher have already eaten dinner. The dishes have been scraped and washed and stacked neatly by the sink. Notebooks, books, and papers take their place on the kitchen table.
I’ll buy another kettle, you say.
That’s not the point, says the teacher. The point is you could have burned the house down. His voice is gently severe, tempered by a frown, the same frown you encountered one day over a decade ago when – arriving at the carriage house and finding the teacher not home despite his promise to be there – you scratched THANKS FOR KEEPING A PROMISE into the door’s blue paint with a rusty nail.
It was an accident. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.
Please try to be more careful.
The teacher introduces you to Curtis.
I’ve heard many things about you, Curtis says ambiguously.
Same here, you say, referring to the passage in one of the teacher’s letters in which he described Curtis saving his life.
An exaggeration, Curtis says. We were travelling in India when he came down with dysentery. I took him to the hospital. Anyone would have done the same.