The Comedown

  There wasn’t much else to the story, at least not according to Maria. She grew up in Shaker Heights with her parents (whom she’d begun to call Don and Amanda because she didn’t believe in naming anything or anyone a second time) and homeschooled herself. She was finished with the seventh grade by the time she turned five, was done with high school by age seven. She took classes at Cleveland Community College—English and German, in which she’d developed an interest after digesting a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. At CCC, Maria was the eager mascot, the affable sidekick, the pleasantly intelligent freak. Stringy-haired college kids in sweaters and Doc Martens playacted as parents, lifting her up into tall desk seats, nudging her with pride when she got an answer correct. For five years, Maria kept herself occupied with the accrual of knowledge—facts she could manipulate and implement in unexpected ways. A class on early Christianity dovetailed well with a seminar on John Milton. A drama class in set design complemented a class in Newtonian physics. Her Achilles’ heel was math; she wasn’t particularly bad at it so much as she found it tedious (combinatorics) or restrictive (Cartesian planes), and so she did it up through Calc III and washed her hands of it—except for symbolic logic, of course.

  For five years, she was an observer. If someone asked her what her favorite thing to think about was—and tons of people did, because she was a line item for good parenting or good medicine or whatever—she’d say “why people see the world the way they do and if the way time moves is a part of that.” Dr. Boza sent the family a yearly Christmas card, a picture of herself and her mustachioed husband sitting together on a porch swing in Sag Harbor, New York: “Wishing You and Yours a Joyous Christmas and a Happy New Year.” Her papers on Maria had won her an endowed chair in neuropsychology at Columbia University.

  Maria was lonely—Don and Amanda worried that she was lonely, and she worried that they were worried—but it couldn’t be helped, and she had no hope of acting purposefully if she was going to spend her time distracted by other kids. She could sustain a kid conversation for a few minutes (anything beyond thirty seconds was because of her exceptional, self-abnegating empathy) before politely excusing herself to cry somewhere in private, wondering what it was about the combination of her thoughts and the thoughts of the kid that made for such an epistemic disaster. Amanda bought her plastic figurines like the ones that came in Happy Meals and Maria told elaborate stories with them when she wasn’t reading or otherwise working: she sat on the cement steps in front of their house and made the Cookie Monster and the Hamburglar speak to each other about how much they loved each other and where they were going to go for lunch. Sometimes she looked up from these storytelling games, having noticed someone walking past or the degree-by-degree descent of the sun, and thought about what a busy and complex place the world was and how she scarcely fit into it.

  She entered Case Western’s undergraduate philosophy program at age twelve, determined to accomplish actual work beyond the wide-eyed accrual of information. She was going to prove first and foremost that there was an external world about which she could make meaningful claims. Then she was going to prove that measurements of that world were respective to their measurers. Amanda drove her to and from class every day.

  No longer was she the friendly, benign kid she’d been at CCC. Now she refuted arguments, debated those stupid enough to take her on, drilled through Hume and Descartes and Wittgenstein, and cheerfully demonstrated her superior knowledge of what she’d read in front of the class. She mastered the Cambridge School, worked her way through Bertrand Russell’s proofs, got as solid a grip as she could on contemporary metaphysics. By their logic—G. E. Moore, Hilary Putnam, David Lewis—she could prove the existence of a world that needed to be spoken about meaningfully, could wade her way through all the hemming and hawing about what yellow really was and whether we’re all talking about the same thing when we say “dog.” There was no private language. The physical world was real and observer-independent. Maria couldn’t understand why the other students didn’t need to believe this as much as she did: what had happened to them that they were so casually detached from all the comforts of being alive? Didn’t they know what a privilege it was to wake up, get dressed, and walk around the lawns of Case Western, to just do that like it was owed them? To do it in the company of others, and to have others know, more or less, what you’re talking about when you relay these experiences? To walk the earth without others who shared your thought-concepts was to be utterly alone. You might as well be dead. Did they want to be dead?

  She wrote her undergraduate thesis on Hilary Putnam’s Twin Earth thought experiment. She slid it into the department head’s wooden cubby and then sat in a chair outside her office, head in her hands, surrounded by the kind of noises she never would’ve heard at CCC: soft, scuffling moccasins on the boys, wedge heels on the girls, hushed conversations, promises politely broken, parties scheduled and rescheduled. Maria had never been invited to a party because there was always alcohol there and why would her mom drive her to something like that? Hair swishing, backpacks rustling, someone talking to a professor in a confident voice. Her classmates were entitled to the world, and they took it for granted. It was their plaything, its existence questioned for sport. The idea hit her hard in the chest, sent her lurching forward and gasping. She could either leave the field and be done with their glibness or she could get her PhD and prove conclusively that the external world exists. No counterexamples, no combative papers, no oppositional panels at conferences: she would give them nothing to debate. The question was whether she was strong enough.

  Now began the part of the story that no one knew about except for Maria, Amanda, and Don: Maria’s second deterioration. At age fifteen, she stopped sleeping. She was up for five, six, seven nights in a row, pacing the house, hands at her elbows, shivering. Her mind, scarred and healed, a tool deftly trained in the acquisition of data, was now misfiring, furred with loud static like TV snow. She snapped her jaw at the air, she tensed her feet and arms in frustration, she lay still in her bed only to roll out of it. She didn’t attend her college graduation. Instead, she was in bed, Don and Amanda ministering to her like she was a sick child who needed chicken soup and Pedialyte. Her old psychiatrist prescribed Risperdal again, which Maria took after brushing her teeth, laughing at the dim face trapped in the mirror.

  She slept only for a few hours every other day. Amanda would lie in bed next to her, holding her hand and whispering that this wasn’t going to be forever. Maria heard this but would keep on squirming and screaming, her body heaving with frustration. Don and Amanda were terrified that their daughter had never been cured, that her illness had just been in remission for thirteen years. Maria became convinced that she wasn’t a person but the freak-vessel for a noxious disease.

  Dr. Boza flew in from New York to examine her. Maria flipped around in her bed to lie on her back and look up at Dr. Boza. She was a small fifteen-year-old, knock-kneed and barely taller than five feet. She’d spent the first part of her life absorbing facts for the sake of fact-absorption, the second part of her life engaged in a project intended to leave people feeling basically optimistic about the existence of the birds in the sky and the ground under their feet, and this new third part gruntingly miserable with the horrible realization that the world’s existence was a thing to be debated at all, that skeptical unreality was so deeply woven into academic discourse—and even into the pessimistic talk of laypeople like her mom and dad—that the fight-for-your-life shapes that’d roused her from her coma might not have existed at all, much less the coma, much less herself, that she might have been foolish and even stupid to stay alive for a world that wasn’t real. She kept all this from Dr. Boza, who could find nothing Déphines-related wrong with her. Her lab work was normal, her psychological evaluations betrayed no immediate suicide risk.

  Maria’s sleepless nights were impossible to medicate, so Amanda ended up staying awake with her, whispering words of encouragement until she herself fell asleep.
Don would often stumble out of the master bedroom around four in the morning to check on them both.

  “Mom,” Maria said one night.

  It was around two o’clock. Amanda was half-asleep. She sat up abruptly, as if she’d always been awake, and said, “Yes, sweetie?”

  “I want to be done with this.”

  “Done with what?”

  “This part of my life.”

  “Okay,” Amanda said. Her voice was small and exhausted in the darkness, trembling in a clueless attempt to be careful. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “I don’t know,” Maria admitted. Her eyes were swollen from crying. There were harmful chemicals running the length of her, corroding her veins, junking up her bloodstream. “I was actually hoping you would.”

  Called upon for the first time in thirteen years to know something her daughter didn’t, Amanda sat forward uneasily, head in her hands. “You don’t want to get the PhD?” she asked.

  Maria arranged herself on her bed so her feet were pressed against the wall, pointed up at the ceiling. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “But you were so excited about getting it before. You’d get in anywhere you applied.”

  Maria took her feet down, put them back up, took them down again. She curled herself into a cruller shape, her nose above her knees. She closed her eyes hard and saw bright lights, electric yellow and blue snake-shapes. She was suffering from the manic energy of indecision and exhaustion, was host to a brain that did not have her best interests at heart. Because that was the awful difference between Maria and most people: there was a her and there was a brain and they were distinct in ways that did not bode well for her survival.

  Amanda’s voice came soft across the carpeted room. “Sweetie?” she asked. “Do you want to just take a break for a while?”

  Maria starfished herself in her bed, exhaling raggedly. “Yes.”

  Then began another major shift in Maria’s short history. She stopped all nature of academic work. She started watching Cartoon Network, a bowl of Pringles balanced on her stomach, wiggling her feet in pleasure at the arcane jokes intended for parents and babysitters. Amanda bought her a flute and Maria learned quickly, playing Mozart concertos alone in her room while watching the TV Amanda had set up for her in there. Don, confounded by his daughter’s sudden lack of ambition, kept himself from asking questions about her plans and progress. “She’s only fifteen,” the other RNs at the clinic told him, “no matter what she does, she’s still gonna be Maria Timpano.”

  Amanda suggested Maria join the orchestra and drama club at Shaker Heights High School. Maria auditioned and won first chair easily. Walking through the hallways of the high school after her audition, flute case hugged to her chest, she felt pleasantly anonymous. She was dressed in a turtleneck and khakis and she was being ignored and the fact of it relaxed her.

  She was sleeping better. In the orchestra rehearsals at the high school, she was, for the first time, surrounded by girls who understood their bodies well enough to ornament them perfectly, who wore purple lipstick and wedge heels and teased their hair into gorgeous updos. And, much to Amanda’s joy and relief, Maria wanted this for herself, asked to be driven to the mall so she could buy low-cut jeans, a red-sleeved jersey shirt with an eagle screen-printed on it, a blue polka-dotted bikini for summer. Although she was not there for typical reasons, she was still a part of student life at Shaker Heights High School. She had to lower her flute to her lap in order to listen to an obnoxious PA announcement in the middle of practice, had to use the lye-smelling girls’ bathroom with the stall that had “I like thick dicks” written confidently on the door. She helped paint the set for Into the Woods, an amateurish azure backdrop.

  The orchestra had a percussionist, a Rimbaud-looking kid with permanently bloodshot eyes. He was popular, in a manner of speaking. When orchestra was over, kids were always flocking around him, following him out the door—guys especially. He encouraged the attention, flipped up the hood of his hoodie, jerked his head in the direction of the parking lot. Maria understood she was either supposed to love him, as many of the grungier girls seemed to, or hate him for his confident dirtiness, which appeared to be the consensus of Shaker High’s upper crust.

  Out of curiosity one day she followed him—Lee was his name—and his crew out the door after orchestra. She stood at the pickup curb in the parking lot, pretending to be busy cleaning her flute but really focused on what was happening behind the first row of cars to her left. There was Lee, flanked by a kid she knew was named Max, a football player. The rest of the kids who’d followed Lee out of the rehearsal room had queued up and were giving him money. Then Max gave them something in return.

  Maria had never seen something like this, but she knew exactly what was happening. They dealt drugs. When Amanda pulled up to the curb, Maria told her to drive slow past the first row of cars. So Amanda did, and the kids dispersed like panicked geese; Max jammed his hands in his pockets. Lee looked up and made eye contact with Maria, who threw her head back, laughing. Drugs seemed like a pleasant waste of time if you had the time to waste.

  One day the orchestra director took an extra-long break, leaving them alone in the classroom. They were rehearsing Clair de lune and the kid on the piano started riffing on the opening bars. Some of the woodwinds joined in, then the brass instruments. Maria played a few arpeggios, her eyes closed, moving her shoulders in rhythm with the music. Then someone was behind her, tapping her on the shoulder. She turned around.

  “You’re bad for business,” Lee said.

  “What?” Maria put down her flute. “What’re you talking about?”

  “I can see you watching us outside. You drove our customers away that one time.”

  She laughed. “Plenty more where that came from.”

  He squatted, rubbing his nose with his thumb in a hyperaffected manner, turning around to see who was looking at them and who wasn’t. “You’re a genius or something, right?”

  She shook her head.

  “Yeah, you are. I’ve read about you in the paper. Like practically my whole life I’ve been reading about you in the paper.”

  “Don’t use that word with me.”

  “Paper?”

  She didn’t say anything. She felt herself smiling.

  “All right.” He looked around again. “How do you like high school?”

  She shrugged. “It’s what you make of it.”

  “What’re you making of it?”

  “I dunno. Flute and drama, I guess.”

  “Can I see your phone a second?”

  Against her better judgment, she gave it to him. He punched some keys and gave it back. “You’ve got my number now. So we can hang out.”

  Something warm bloomed in her chest, and she crossed her ankles involuntarily. “Okay,” she said.

  She didn’t tell Amanda about it. She started an application to Princeton’s PhD program in philosophy. It was the highest-ranked program of its kind and she’d corresponded with some of the faculty while she was still an undergraduate at Case Western. She submitted it well before the deadline.

  Lee called, like a dispatch from another universe. He called again and she picked up. He told her it was going to be his birthday next week and asked if she would mind hanging out with him. She said she wouldn’t mind, and he picked her up in his mom’s car, rusted out above the wheels, and drove her to University Circle. She’d grown an inch or two in the past year, but he still had several inches on her, especially when she wore the flat-soled winter boots she’d been wearing since she was twelve. His head dipped low, his hand was on her cheek, there was a warm buzzing in her chest, then her throat. They kissed awkwardly, then smoothly, snow falling down around them. Maria smiling involuntarily behind the kiss, finding it very funny that this thing was happening between them, remembering him as she’d first seen him: hair in his bloodshot eyes, banging on a drum.

  They started spending time together. Maria lied to Don and Amanda about having “e
xtended tech work” for Into the Woods. Every day after three o’clock, they went to Lee’s apartment, where he lived with his luminescent mother, Diedre. In his room—the room of a real teenager, be-postered, messy—Maria got high for the first time on what Lee claimed was the “best and stickiest sativa-strain there is.” She choked immediately, but the second drag was successful, and her palms felt a little sweaty and light, her heart raced a little, her head buzzed happily.

  Maria liked this new way of living. She poured her energy into increasingly elaborate lies for Don and Amanda. (Both were graying a little now, Don thickening but Amanda still thin, both mystified by their daughter’s blossoming social life but also thankful for it, confident that she knew better than they did the right thing to do—she always had, anyway.) At one point Lee asked if she could stay at his place overnight, so Maria made up a fake sleepover. Then she brought an overnight bag to orchestra practice and Lee drove her back to his place, lighting up a blunt at a red light, Maria smoking most of it as they drove, her mind blissfully free, distracted by how Lee’s car was a simple and pleasant reprieve from the cold, how Lee nuzzled her whenever they were stopped.

  They sat on his bed, and Lee put his icicle hands up her sleeves and kissed her. Then, half-warm, half-cold, they stripped down to their underwear and slipped under the sheets. He kissed her collarbones. He kissed the skin just above her bra. Trembling, he peeled back one cup of her bra and kissed the skin there, too, which made every relevant part of her body tighten and sigh. She rubbed her feet together rapidly. She put her arms around his neck and looked at the crown of his head. He stopped kissing her, pulled away, and was kneeling on the bed. “Hold on,” he said, and bent backward to find something in one of the drawers of his night table. He produced a condom and showed it to her meekly in the bedroom’s postsunset light. “I’ve technically never done this,” he said. She told him she hadn’t, either, and she nodded when he asked her if she’d like to.