The Inventors

by Peter Selgin

  You wait for her to say more.

  That’s it, she says. We said goodbye and I rode the Greyhound back home.

  You never saw him again?

  Vivian shakes her head. Nope. Never, she says.

  After a pause she adds: I’m still recovering.

  AFTER LEAVING THE museum, in a downpour, Vivian and you walk to the subway entrance. On the way there she says:

  I was almost afraid to call you. I wasn’t sure that you’d want to hear from me again after how I treated you back in high school. If my memory serves me I was pretty damn shitty to you.

  I won’t disagree, you say.

  I was a mean fucking bitch.

  If you want an argument you won’t get one from me.

  If it’s not too late, I’d like to apologize. She says this without looking at you and as the rain falls harder. You both step over an overflowing gutter.

  There’s nothing to apologize for. You were young. We were both young. And if my memory serves me, I was a pretty big jerk myself.

  Well, I’m sorry if I was cruel. It wasn’t called for.

  At the subway entrance, you both collapse your umbrellas. Vivian kisses you on the cheek and rushes down the stairs to the subway. You’re both headed the same direction, downtown to Grand Central, but from the way she hurries down those stairs it’s clear to you that she’s had enough of your company. You’ll never see or hear from her again.

  * * *

  FOUR YEARS LATER, ANOTHER INSOMNIA-INSPIRED WEE hour web search produced the teacher’s obituary. Of course you were stunned. For a long time you sat there, staring at the headline before even clicking on the newspaper article. It seemed impossible to you – not so much because the teacher died so young (he was only sixty-three), but because through all these years somewhere in the back of your mind you still believed the day would arrive when you and he would be united again. Though consciously you had relinquished that hope, dismissed and outgrown and even found it objectionable, deep inside, instinctively, even as you approached your forty-seventh birthday, you continued to cling to it.

  According to the obituary, the teacher’s family had chosen not to specify the cause of death, though “a history of heart problems” was alluded to. Apart from the teacher’s untimely death itself, several things about the notice that ran in a local Oregon newspaper struck you as curious, and not just curious, but alarming.

  The obituary stated that the teacher had been “a member of the Seneca Tribe of Indians.” This was news to you. The teacher had never said anything to you about having Native American origins, let alone being a member of any tribe.

  The notice went on to say that, according to his sister, the teacher attended what at the time was a community college in Connecticut. It made no mention of the teacher’s having been a Rhodes Scholar and gone to Oxford and Berkeley. Nor did the obituary mention the fact that he’d been adopted. It said only that he had been survived by two sisters and a brother. Yet you could have sworn – in fact you were certain – that when you knew him the teacher told you he was adopted, that he’d never known his biological parents, and furthermore that one of his adoptive brothers, a paraplegic, the Man in the Wheelchair, had abused him.

  For a moment you wondered if possibly the obituary was that of a different person with the same name. But no: it was the teacher, there was no question about it. Further searches on the internet turned up other articles published on the occasion of the teacher’s death, including one accompanied by a photograph of the teacher standing at a podium behind a microphone, wearing the bone pendant and Indian-pattered vest, his formerly blond hair dyed black and worn in a ponytail under a khaki baseball cap.

  Not long afterward you discovered the obituary of the young man the teacher had been living with when you visited him in Oregon. Curtis. He died less than a month after the teacher, the cause of death undisclosed.

  What had caused Curtis’s death? And the teacher’s? Had they been lovers? Had the teacher been gay? Was he really Native American? Had he gone to Oxford? Or had he lied about those and other things? If he lied, why did he lie? For what reason? To what end? Who was the teacher? Who had he been, really? And why did it matter?

  Did it matter?

  It did. It mattered to you because your idea of yourself, your identity, was built in large measure on the belief that you were special, and this belief, this notion, had been underwritten if not occasioned outright by your friendship with the teacher, by his having taken you into his confidence and made you his friend. And though that friendship had come to a pathetic end, in spite of its ending, still, you’d held on to that fundamental belief; you had clung to it. And now the identity of the human being who had been its basis – the keystone in the archway of your ego – had come under question. Therefore you had to know. Your own identity depended on it.

  And so, as you had done with your father six years before, you set out to learn all that you could about the teacher.

  IN THE WIDELY HELD VIEW OF CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGISTS, each of us, to a greater or lesser extent, erects a so-called “false self.” Whereas a person’s real or true self is rooted in the primary experience of being alive, of lungs breathing and heart beating and blood pumping through veins, the false self has its origins in the expectations of others, it’s the defensive façade we construct to protect ourselves from encroachments from without – initially from the demands and wishes of our parents, but also from the demands imposed on us subsequently by others. To the extent that we feel that others don’t care enough about us, our needs and our feelings, that we don’t matter, that who and what we essentially are is somehow insufficient to earn a sense of belonging, then we create a false sense in order to gain back that sense.

  In the long run, the false self originating out of a childhood need to connect may become like a drug to which we become addicted, so being “special” becomes the only way to live, and living as a false self becomes the only way to feel special.

  The strain of maintaining such a false identity often leads to depression and anxiety later on in life. It also inhibits or precludes the possibility of developing one’s true self and authentic personality, of achieving, in Maslow’s term, self-actualization. …

  We know also from Jung, and from our earlier discussion of psychological polarities, that conscious and unconscious are riven into that strife of father and son, or of ego and Self, by the ego which either “father” or “son” may dominate and whose dividing light makes differences in our wholeness.

  Pathological lying (PL) is characterized by a long history (maybe lifelong) of frequent and repeated lying for which no apparent psychological or external benefit can be discerned.

  JAMES HILLMAN, “Sinex and Peur: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present.”

  Ethnic fraud: falsely claiming American Indian heritage or other minority status in order to boost job prospects. (See Ward Churchill, Andrea Smith, and most recently Rachel Dolezal.)

  In the end, perhaps Dolezal simply believed the convictions of her academic culture a little too much. After all, we on the left have insisted for years that the various demographic categories we are placed into are merely social constructs, the creation of human assumption and human prejudice. That race is a social construct is a stance that brooks no disagreement in left-wing spaces.

  FREDRIK DEBOER, “Why Rachel Dolezal would want to pass as a black woman,” L.A. Times op-ed.

  The daughter of Sky Woman gave birth to twins. Right-Handed Twin was born the normal way. Left-Handed Twin forced himself out of his mother’s left armpit, killing her …

  Together the twins invented the world. Right-Handed Twin created mountains, lakes, blossoms, gentle creatures; Left-Handed Twin created cliffs, whirlpools, thorns, thunder, and predators. Right-Handed Twin was truthful, reasonable, goodhearted, and honest; Left-Handed Twin lied, fought, rebelled, and made questionable choices …

  The Iroquois believe that Left-Handed Twin and Right-Handed Twin are both
necessary for the world to be in balance.

  IROQUOIS CREATION MYTH

  “INDUCED QUADRATURE FIELD MOTOR.” From Patent No. 2,736,853

  XXVIII.

  Castalia

  1943 – 2006

  YOU PORED THROUGH ARTICLES AND WEBSITES. YOU found a newspaper article published almost ten years before the teacher’s death. It emphasized the teacher’s ties, not to his ancestral tribal roots, but to Vietnam, to where he was about to journey for the ninth time in connection with the exchange program he had helped establish there.

  According to the article, the teacher’s ties with Vietnam stretched back across fifty years, to World War II, when his father had been part of an army team assigned to help Ho Chi Minh fight the Japanese. According to the article, three of the teacher’s brothers had fought in the Vietnam War.

  “One lost his life,” said the article, “another his legs, the third his place is society; he couldn’t relate to people anymore.” Later, when the teacher was a graduate student, as refugees from Southeast Asia began pouring into the United States, their struggle to assimilate into a foreign culture affected him deeply “because of his own American heritage” – a statement that, if it pointed at all to the teacher’s indigenous roots, did so ambiguously at best.

  Otherwise the article said nothing about the teacher’s origins, tribal or otherwise. It focused instead on the enormous changes Vietnam had undergone since the war, on the reestablishment of diplomatic and other relations between it and the United States, and on the teacher’s “enchantment” with those changes.

  “My one regret,” the article concludes with the teacher saying, “is that my brothers aren’t alive to see it.”

  YOU WROTE A letter to the teacher’s one surviving relative, his sister, a brief note to which you appended your phone number and the wish that she get in touch with you. “It would mean a lot to me,” you wrote.

  A few days after you posted the letter, the teacher’s sister phoned you.

  What would you like to know? she asked.

  She had a husky voice.

  Through the teacher’s only surviving sibling, you learned that he never went to Oxford. He never went to Berkeley. He’d had seven siblings, including two brothers, each of who served in Vietnam. One brother was killed in action there, the other suffered permanent mental wounds. Yes, there’d been a third brother who was a paraplegic, but he hadn’t been injured in the war; he had indeed broken his spine jumping off a bridge into a lake. His name was Frank. He might have abused his younger brother, it was possible, she couldn’t say for sure.

  Your brother told me he was adopted. Was he?

  Is that what he said? She laughed. That doesn’t surprise me.

  Not true?

  No, but I understand why he said it.

  Their family had been “dirt poor,” nine of them living in a four-room double-wide house infested with mice and cockroaches. Their father had been a drunk unemployed firehose factory worker with emphysema. They survived on welfare and food stamps.

  What else do you want to know? the teacher’s sister asked you.

  Are you Native American?

  Oh that, the teacher’s sister said. There may be some native blood on my mother’s side. She used to talk about it. There were stories. That’s all I can tell you.

  From his surviving sister you’ll learn that, during the last months of the teacher’s life, when he and Curtis both knew he was dying, Curtis took to drinking heavily.

  Yes, she said, anticipating your next question. Curtis committed suicide.

  Were he and your brother lovers?

  I really don’t know. Let’s just say their relationship was very intense.

  Was your brother married?

  Not that I know of.

  He told me he had a wife in Vietnam.

  Did he? That’s the first I’ve heard of it.

  He said he lived with her six months out of the year.

  News to me.

  Was he lying, do you think?

  With my brother anything was possible. He traveled to Vietnam a lot. He was close to a lot of people there. Maybe he married one of them. Who knows?

  What else can I tell you? the teacher’s surviving sister said as your phone conversation drew to its close. He was a good man, my brother, a very good man. He truly wanted to help people. He did help them, hundreds of them. He died helping them. In the last half-dozen years of his life, he made something like forty trips to Vietnam and back. His weak heart couldn’t take it anymore. He broke it helping other people. He broke Curtis’s heart, too. And just about everyone that knew and loved him. Mine especially. He broke my heart. I’m still trying to recover. No – I take that back. I won’t ever recover. He was very dear to me. He was by far my favorite brother. I still can’t believe he’s gone.

  And you? the teacher’s sister asked you after a pause. Why does any of this matter so much to you? Who was my brother to you?

  It was what you were trying to figure out.

  We were friends, you answered. Close friends.

  THE NEXT ITEM of evidence you uncovered was a video interview produced by the cable channel of the university where the teacher had worked at the time of his death. The interview was conducted by an attractive, if nervous-looking, young woman with a pageboy hairdo. She introduced the teacher, listing his many accomplishments as a champion of indigenous peoples and their causes, how he had planned and organized schools, launched exchange programs, and had been instrumental in forming and strengthening global alliances between universities and other institutions in Vietnam and elsewhere.

  To one of her questions the teacher responds: The challenge isn’t merely for indigenous and other culturally displaced people and immigrants to enjoy the rights of other established citizens but to hold onto their history – to where they come from and what makes them distinct. I don’t subscribe to the melting-pot metaphor. You shouldn’t have to melt. You shouldn’t have to give up your cultural roots to be part of a new culture.

  As in the photograph in one of the obituaries, the teacher wears his dyed hair in a ponytail under a khaki baseball cap. He still wears the round, metal-framed glasses he wore when you were his eighth-grade pupil.

  Three-quarters of the way through the video the interviewer asks the teacher if he has a “personal stake in these challenges.” There follows a lengthy pause during which the teacher casts his eyes upward. He licks his lips and blinks rapidly before saying:

  That’s a difficult question.

  You don’t have to answer it, the interviewer says.

  No, no: let me see if I can do this …

  The teacher explains that he comes from a mixed cultural background, that on his mother’s side they were descended from the Six Nations of Seneca, otherwise known as the Iroquois by the French and by other names coined for them by their invaders. On his father’s side they were Onondaga and Welsh. His father’s family left Wales to work the coal mines of New York and northeastern Pennsylvania. Because miners were frowned upon by the earlier settlers, they were considered unsuitable material for marriage. Having few options, they’d often marry into native communities. That’s how the Onondaga and Seneca heritages were joined, the teacher explains, adding: But I consider myself a contemporary North American by destiny as well as by choice.

  The teacher’s answers to the interviewer’s questions seemed sincere, they sounded authentic. And anyway why would anyone make up such things – and in such great specific detail? Still, you were perplexed by the fact that in the time you knew him not once had the teacher mentioned any of these things to you. On the contrary, the things he did say contradicted them.

  In the video the teacher goes on to explain how as a teenager he suffered an identity crisis, wondering who he was, where he belonged, and if he belonged anywhere. Was I Onondaga? Welch? American? He traveled to Wales, he explained, where he took part in an ancient druidic ceremony commemorating the onset of spring in which a seventy-foot-tall effigy of t
he Welch spring goddess Blodeuwedd sculpted from holly branches was set aflame and plunged into the Irish Sea.

  Not the sort of thing I expected from white people, the teacher told the interviewer.

  Though you spent the better part of the next hour trying, you were unable to verify whether such a ritual or anything like it had ever taken place in Wales, or, for that matter, anywhere else.

  THAT FALL, YOU wrote to the Vital Records Specialist at the Allegany Clerk’s Office of the Seneca Nation of Indians asking for any information they might have regarding the teacher’s tribal heritage. Four months later, you received the following reply:

  Dear Mr. Selgin,

  This letter is in regards to a genealogy request that was received in this office on October 9, 2012, with respect to Mr. ————, born on April 16, 1943. Unfortunately, after an extensive search, I am unable to confirm any Seneca ancestry.

  Our census books contain only the names of Senecas that were residing on the Allegany Indian Reservation or the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation from 1858 through the late 1960s. The need for a census to be conducted was no longer required once the Tribal Roll System was established. Your relatives may very well have been of Seneca descent, but if they did not reside on the reservation during the census era, we would have no record of them.

  At this point my record will be filed as completed.

  In a handwritten note accompanying the letter, the Vital Records Specialist notes that the teacher’s surname “never existed in [their] census books or in the tribal roll.”

  STILL, YOU WEREN’T satisfied. Supposing the teacher never claimed he was “a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians”? What if the obituary had gotten things wrong? Obituaries are seldom written by their subjects, after all.