When we played, he’d reverentially remove the pieces from his box—he had an old and enormous set with wooden pieces the size of my palm—and lean forward. “With these,” he’d say—quoting Charles the First, I later learned, though at the time I thought it was his own private phrase—“ruler and subject strive without bloodshed.” So maybe that’s it: all the sublimated war impulses, the breathless following of geopolitics, were a desperate craning of the neck down a road decidedly not taken.
But these are not questions that a child thinks to ask, and by the time I knew to ask them, there were no answers forthcoming.
It was too bad my father never got to see how the Cold War ended; he would have been tickled beyond belief that our CIA never saw it coming. (“Do you know how many people are getting outrageous salaries to try to read Chernenko’s body language, Irina?” he’d say to me. “They get fifty bucks every time he sneezes. I tell you, kid, it’s nice work if you can get it.”) He would have loved the coup attempt in ’91 (he loved nothing better than a good coup attempt). He would have loved to see the falling of the Berlin Wall. My father had a limitless capacity to be touched by the histories of other nations, the fates of other people—and more than that, he loved the intricate ballet of advance and retreat. He loved it all in real life as much as on the chessboard. Like Lear—like anyone—he wanted to see who won and who lost. He wanted to see how things would turn out.
And if I’m honest, that’s a good part of my own grief these days. Not a majority—that’s composed of good old-fashioned fear, the animal will to survive tangling with the cold pronouncements of medical science. But a fairly significant amount—maybe 15 percent or so—is just sorry that I don’t get to see the end.
So I wish my father, the dedicated Russophile, had been able to watch these things. Although in a way, I suppose he did. He was in the same room as it all. In ’89, when the Wall came down, he was still at home, and he spent most of his days in darkened rooms, the lunar light of the television flickering across his eyes. That Christmas, Ceauescu was executed along with his wife, their pale corpses paraded across Romanian state television for the viewers’ satisfaction. My father sat with a bib, trying to bring stewed carrots to his cheek and missing. In ’91 came the footage of Yeltsin bellowing at a tank: by then my father was in a nursing home, his mouth agog, his eyes glazed, his hands waving and reaching at things just beyond his reach. The Cold War had ended, and its terminal images were flashed across the television for the smug first world to see. And though my father was, by that point, fairly indifferent to these events, I suppose it’s right to say that he technically lived long enough to see them.
Everyone is their brain, of course—and in my callous worldview, everyone is only their brain. But my father was somehow especially his brain. His sense of self came from brilliant inferences, razor-sharp memories, a sense of humor that cut you off at the knees and left you unsure what had happened until you tried to walk away. Some people have other elements at their core that can sustain some brain damage—a silliness or a sweetness or a faith—and Huntington’s can take quite a while to completely unravel them. Some people die with gentleness intact, and there is room to believe that they are still in there somewhere, if you’re the kind of person who likes to believe those things. With my father, it was not like that. He was a mind, first and foremost, and a mind is an elaborate system of pulleys and levers and delicate balances. And when one piece is missing, the whole system has lost its integrity.
Early in the disease, the minor disorientations and lapses that happen to everyone occasionally started happening to him all the time. Then his sense of causality went—moments existed outside of consequence or context. He sat at the piano, but he no longer played. His personality dulled into a crude, distorted version of itself. He grew younger, in terms of preoccupations and anxieties. Then his memory started to erase from the present backward. I disappeared. Then, eventually, my mother did.
In the very beginning of his illness—in those bewildering few months after I beat him at chess for the first time—people always assumed he was drunk. At nine in the morning, on Tuesday nights, in grocery stores and in libraries and once, horribly, at my school play, people looked and whispered and shifted their weight. My mother would keep her eyes straight forward, so she couldn’t see them be embarrassed for her. I would twist in my seat and roll my eyes and think I might absolutely die of mortification. I spent most of my teenage years convinced that my genetic status was irrelevant, since I wouldn’t survive the sheer raw humiliations of adolescence anyway.
Later, my father started to look like a caricature of someone who was sick, and occasionally people would think that he was making a tasteless joke with his exaggerated movements, his rhythmic jerking, the little oppositional gestures he made to overcompensate. People who saw him from behind would sometimes go quiet in disapproval until they saw his pale, gaunt face and eyes that seemed to have receded too far into his skull. Then they’d stay quiet.
At the end, his arms went wild in great loping movements, his fingers twisting. My mother fed him with an incredible ease and tenderness, opening her mouth wide at him the way you do with an infant to get him to eat. I fed him sometimes when I was home on college vacation, and I always felt slightly awkward and embarrassed to be doing it—as if he were going to snap out of it at any moment and look at me sharply and ask me what the hell I was doing.
Do not let anyone tell you the psyche goes quiet into that good night. It writhes, gropes for meaning, until the last. He unfurled nonsense with the same jittering repetitiveness as his interminable string of nucleotides. At the end he was choking on his own saliva. It is not a way to die.
The day I got my results, it was windy. I walked out in the street after talking with the geneticist—even though I wasn’t supposed to be alone, Claire had known from the look I gave her that I would murder her with my own two still-functional hands if she tried to follow me. Skeletal leaves scraped the sides of buildings; the T shuddered past the Mass General Hospital stop, and an army of medical students got out; the Charles River was dull and polluted all of a sudden, speckled with a few halfhearted red sailboats. The sky looked nauseous. And I was struck by two thoughts—one, that all of this had already lost something for me. And two, what an unoriginal thought that was.
I threw up in an alley. People passed by me, startled—was I a cancer patient, sick from chemotherapy? Was I about to terminate an unwanted pregnancy? Was I on drugs? It was the beginning of this kind of looking and questioning: exactly how much pity, in the end, did I deserve? How was it best meted out, if at all?
It had been ten years since I beat my father at chess for the first time. Inheriting from the paternal line makes for a younger onset. In the office, they’d told me that my CAG number—my number of clotted chromosomal nucleotides—was 50, corresponding to an average onset of thirty-two years of age. Half of the people with a CAG number of 50 become symptomatic earlier than thirty-two, half become symptomatic later. That is what an average is.
The doctors gave me this information on a helpful chart where CAG numbers are plotted against average onsets—like looking up the healthy weight for your height, or the appropriate benchmarks for your infant’s psychological development.
I walked out of the alley and Claire was standing there, holding my coat for me. I had vomit on my shoes. She put the coat around me and held it around my shoulders on the T. I sat shaking, and Harvard students gave me dark looks on their way back from the internships that would propel them into the great wide world. We watched the smoky gray clouds in the pink sky across the river. We counted the sailboats. We went home and drank and swore for three days straight.
I was still in college then. There had been much agonizing over whether to give me my results so young, but I convinced everyone that it was the responsible thing—so I could plan whether to have children, so I could set the kind of short-term attainable goals that terminal people are so fond of. I employed depths of ma
turity and bullshit I didn’t even know I had at the time, talked philosophically and stoically, pretended to have a faith in God and a good attitude (of which I have neither). I met with a psychologist, and I said things like “I’m not going to let this thing beat me” and “It’s in the hands of the Lord.” Afterward, I collapsed and drew in on myself and fell into the dark depression I’d promised everyone I would avoid.
Claire and I were living in a big gray two-story near Somerville that year. I was, I fear, very difficult. I stopped doing schoolwork. Claire dragged me through my Formal Logic problem sets. I stopped going to campus or eating. Claire brought me bagels and left them outside my door. I moped. I skulked. I monopolized our shower for hours, running all the hot water and using all the grapefruit shampoo, because it was the only place in the house where nobody could hear me crying.
I started bringing home different men every weekend, and all Claire did was ask me to bring home cuter ones. “I know you’re having a breakdown, and I respect that,” she said. “I just think you could be doing better in this department.”
Now, of course, it’s very different, and I look back on that time with a sort of bemused chagrin. It’s a wonder that I escaped college without an unwanted pregnancy at the very least—full-blown AIDS at the worst. Somebody asked me about it once—a frat boy, strangely enough—as I was shrugging off the condom he dangled before me. “Don’t you worry about AIDS?” he said. And out loud I said no, not really, but in my head I thought, Please, please, please let me get AIDS so I can die of pneumonia, so my brain is the last thing out the door, so that when I die, it is actually me dying and not somebody else.
I graduated somehow, barely. I majored in philosophy. A false premise yielding a false conclusion is logically valid, as I recall. Then I went for my doctorate in comparative literature. I studied Nabokov.
Other people laugh about staying in academia their whole lives: spending an eternity earning a Ph.D., gathering up knowledge they can’t hope to practically employ, studying the countless refracted interpretations of a world they’ve never experienced. Being a perpetual academic is living in a potential energy that never becomes kinetic. I have trouble laughing about this.
After college I calmed down considerably. I’m not out much, but very occasionally—once or twice in the past five years, let’s say—I’ll meet someone interesting, with a dry sense of humor and a dark intelligence, and I’ll know objectively that this is the kind of person whom, in another lifetime, I would want. I can see this other lifetime sometimes, if I squint, but I don’t particularly resent it. It’s like looking at other people’s vacation photos. And if there is an actual sense of loneliness or longing, it’s like feeling a human hand touch you through gauze—removed and almost unrecognizable.
I began playing chess Saturdays in Harvard Square, against the old wizened men who charge you a dollar to lose to them. I did not grow up to be a chess prodigy—or any other kind, for that matter. But I find something compelling in the game’s choreography, the way one move implies the next. The kings are an apt metaphor for human beings: utterly constrained by the rules of the game, defenseless against bombardment from all sides, able only to temporarily dodge disaster by moving one step in any direction.
The chess men emerged without comment in early March, sitting in the stoic steam of their coffees, waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with them and become alive again. The chess men came back before the street performers—the live statues that locked and unlocked themselves for loose change, silvery-black-skinned men who beat on overturned plastic buckets, wild-eyed prophets who described in lurid detail the end of the world. The chess men came back before the academic tours of ambitious young people started to create big traffic blocks, before the college students stripped down to only their unnatural tans and fanned languidly across the Square, before all of Cambridge roused itself sufficiently to once again protest the foreign policy disaster of the moment. My favorite opponent was a man named Lars, who stationed himself at the chess sets with such fierce commitment that I’d forget he could, if he wanted to, get up and walk away. The first day I met him he took one look at me and said, “You look like somebody who feels sorrier for yourself than is strictly necessary.”
I’d been out wandering, as I often did in those days. It was two years after I’d gotten my results, and I was halfway through my dissertation on trilingual wordplay in Ada, or Ardor. I liked the bitter cold the best; it narrowed the meandering, self-indulgent courses of my mind into a focused dissatisfaction with what was right in front of me. This, I’ll be the first to admit, was an improvement.
I sat down, and Lars promptly decimated me at chess, then told me exactly what was wrong with my game and with me, more generally. After that, we were friends.
Lars told me a lot of other things eventually, though there was no way that all of it was true. He’d been born in Stockholm, he said, the son of shipping magnates, descended from Swedish royalty. His family had lost everything during the embargoes of 1979. He’d been homeless in Philadelphia, spent a year in Hong Kong, been dishonorably discharged from the Swedish military for reasons he would not discuss. There were conflicts in his stories, mysteries, great gaping holes in time and space, but Lars did not respond to challenges on these fronts except by starting to beat me faster when I asked nosy questions. So I learned not to. Lars lived off of bluffs, wild claims that were never, ever verifiable. He’d worked in a mine on the Black Sea, he said. He’d jumped trains in Moldova, he’d learned to recite the Qur’an from Pakistani immigrants in London. And who could say with absolute certainty that he had not?
There’s an intimacy in listening to somebody’s lies, I’ve always thought—you learn more about someone from the things they wish were true than from the things that actually are. Sometimes, though, there were intentional provocations—allusions to bastard children, assassination attempts, that sort of thing. Or worse, advice. Analyses. Witty aphorisms. “You know what your problem is?” he asked me more than once. And even though I always told him that I did know what my problem was—that it had been revealed to me via the best genetic testing science could offer—he invariably gave his own interpretation. “Too much thinking” or “Not enough sex” or “Not enough thinking about sex,” he would say. These assessments were typically followed by instructive tales from his own life, in which having sex or avoiding thinking saved the day.
The last time I saw him before he stopped talking, Lars told me about being shot at in Turkey. It was the end of March, the time of year in New England when you feel yourself regaining the will to live. The sky was a weak white, and the people floated through Harvard Square like brightly colored aquarium fish of all different shapes and origins. I’d bought us both coffees. Lars put five sugars in his, then sent me back into the coffee shop for more. When I returned and looked disapproving, he said, “You know what your problem is? You’re afraid to have any fun.”
“I have fun,” I said, taking a sip of coffee and spilling some on my coat. The board between us was still a blank slate. There were limitless ways for either of us to win or lose, although we could both be pretty sure which way it would go. “I have all kinds of fun,” I said. “Fun such as you could not imagine.”
“I’ll bet,” he said. “You look just like the kind of girl with a secret life of fun.”
I opened by advancing my king’s knight. Lars mirrored me. “You can’t even imagine the fun,” I said. “You don’t even want to.”
“I, however,” he said, “have had a life full of adventure. I have narrowly cheated death many times. I have earned the right to a little sugar in my coffee now and then.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Did I ever happen to mention the time I was almost killed in Turkey?”
I was not allowed to ask him what he’d been doing in Turkey in the first place; this would be viewed as unforgivably intrusive and rude. The rules of the game were long established.
“It was a few hours outs
ide Ankara,” he told me. There was a flurry of pawn movement, the debut introduction of the bishops. Lars’s attitude toward chess was the same as his general attitude toward life: you can’t be squeamish about it. You have to embrace it, fuck with it a little, see what it will do to you. Excessive calculation leads to paralysis, which leads to death.
“Wait, when was this?” I said, which I knew would irritate him. Irritating Lars was a tactic of mine. I advanced my bishop’s pawn and planned to advance my queen’s pawn next, in order to consolidate a pawn center and finally, for once, perhaps, drive Lars away.
“The seventies. Who can remember, exactly? Before you were born.”
“I’m thirty.”
“Please.” He made a face and introduced his queen. It was early for her, though the move was technically aboveboard. She wasn’t vulnerable to attack, and he was only trying to maintain his hold on the center. I flattered myself that this meant he was worried. “It is not classy for a woman to admit her age,” he said.
I squinted at the board. Lars had folded his king protectively behind his queen and her knight. In the center of the board, my bishop and pawns were lined up as if before a firing squad.
“Anyway,” Lars said. “I was with a friend. A woman friend.” Most of Lars’s stories featured a woman friend—always different, like Bond girls, entering the narration long enough to be seductive and saved and exiting without a fuss. Lars told me again and again how beautiful he was in his youth. When I knew him, he had streaked and matted gray hair and always dressed in plaid, but there was a certain impish quality to his blue eyes that I suppose somebody could have found attractive once, although I don’t pretend to be an expert on these things. Of all the stories Lars told me, the ones about his beauty are the ones I think he most wanted to be true.
A Partial History of Lost Causes: A Novel: A Novel Page 3