of
this
hour.
I had to stop for a moment, my hands on my knees, my breath in my throat, to make sure it was her, and not a ghost. Eventually she felt us there, and turned. She was shaking and clutching her braid in her fist.
“The meaning changes,” her uncanny face said. “Depending on the day.”
We drove her straight home, without collecting our rosewater cakes. She didn’t even ask about them, having lapsed into one of her silences. Not a good day after all.
“I hear you had a little adventure,” Dad said as we came inside. I stood there as he helped her out of her boots. She did not seem alert enough to be frightened, and that was a blessing, in a way. Now he would have to accept that we should tag her; she would definitely go missing again.
The slide, I thought. It might bring her back. I reached into my backpack for my hard shell glasses case, where I’d stowed it the day before.
Empty.
I closed it and opened it again.
Still empty.
The little mailer was not anywhere in my backpack. I put the bag down and went out to the car, but it was also not anywhere in the car. I sat in the backseat and tried, half-heartedly, to locate it, even though I knew I’d turned the locater off. I thought of my mom’s blank face, of her existence that was no longer quite in my world, and suddenly I knew, in that dangerously unscientific way I sometimes know things, that she had Mitch. She had held my backpack for me in the café. She must have felt his significance—his familiar presence, the residual warmth from my hand—and wanted him for herself.
Too much time had passed and Jonas had noticed. He came out onto the steps in his clogs, squinting, and when he saw me, he joined me in the backseat.
“I’ve lost Mitch,” I told him.
“What do you mean you’ve lost him? Who’s Mitch?”
I told him everything, including my suspicions of my mom, but he didn’t understand. “Can’t you just make another slide? You still have the tissue.”
“It’s the principle.” I was almost crying. “I fucked up. I crossed the line.”
“Well, why don’t we ask her?” Jonas said. My partner, the non-scientist, who never met a problem he couldn’t solve. Before I could argue, he’d gotten us out of the car and back into the house and was calling my mother by name.
“Laura?” he asked, “Laura.” My heart was beating audibly. I stepped up behind him, using the right side of his body as a shield.
“Did you take a slide from Sarah’s backpack?”
She blinked and he repeated the question. “It would have been in her glasses case. It’s from one of her brains and she needs it. It belongs to her lab.”
“Mitch Wilkins,” I blurted. “Remember?”
“Mitch?” she cried, as though he’d come to see her after all these years. “You know Mitch?”
“Not exactly,” I said.
“Did I ever tell you about him?” She was smiling now, and I was terrified of the nonsense she was about to spew. After all we’d been through that day, I didn’t think I could handle any more.
“Yes, he was your student,” I said. “That’s why I wanted to show you.”
“And in the summers he was a groundskeeper at the college,” Mom went on. “With his uncle who was there for years, what was his name, Tim. I used to see them hauling branches around. Seemed like a big part of the job, actually, just collecting giant branches in their trucks.”
“Really.” I couldn’t believe she had so much to say. Even though I now realized that this was exactly what I’d been hoping for: the famous person triggering memories where other interventions failed.
“And there was one day when I was driving in from town, and it must’ve been August because the students were starting to move back in. And at that first traffic circle, I see him on the front lawn of, you remember, that dorm by the first traffic circle, and he’s standing there with a student and a giant purple sofa, one of those fainting couches, you know the kind. And they keep looking at the couch and then at the door, and it’s clear they have a problem.”
“What year was this?” I asked, but she wasn’t listening. She was listening to her own brilliant memory. I could’ve killed myself for interrupting.
“When I drove by again,” she said, “he was gone and she was gone and so was the couch. I decided he must’ve found a way.” Her face was full color, and she was swaying a bit in her seat. “You remember his uncle, Tim? In the summers he was a groundskeeper at the college.”
My heart sank. “Right, that’s what you said.”
“He was a groundskeeper. He tried to kiss me once.”
“Mom!”
So much for sanity.
“He did.” She made her cute, pouty face. “What, you don’t believe me? You don’t believe a big football player could ever want to kiss your little mom?”
“I believe it,” Dad said.
“I told you that story,” she insisted.
“I know you did,” Dad said.
“There I was, this radical Yankee.”
Now she was really sounding like her old self, the braggy, embarrassing one who’d had too much to drink.
“I’m sorry, guys, I have to—”
“He called me up a few years ago,” she said.
“Who—Mitch?”
She nodded, and the motion was liquidy, her head bobbing like a buoy on her neck. “He was going through old things. And he said he found a paper he owed me. Can you imagine? He wanted to turn it in. I said, ‘But Mitch, you already walked, remember? Graduation was forty years ago.’ But he said, no, he was a man of his word. He had promised me a paper on The Great Gatsby, and he wanted me to have it.”
“Come on, Mom, really?” I didn’t believe her. She’d raised me to be rational, and I just didn’t believe her.
“So he got in his car and he drove up here and he came to my desk and he gave me the paper. That was when he kissed me. He was so old. Oh, sweetie, he was wearing headgear to protect his eyes, like someone out of science fiction. He had rose-colored glasses, to protect his eyes.”
Mitch had indeed worn migraine goggles for the last fifteen years of his life, a blind man look that was sort of disarming, at least on video. For his last decade, he’d also lived with an occipital implant. I wondered if Mom knew about that, too. She was looking at a middle distance between the wall and my face, her eyes filled with that reflexive water. Her voice kept cracking, as though through a bad connection, a voice from the past telling me about the future, or a voice from the future telling me about the past. Whichever it was, her information was incomplete, scattered, and partial—but that didn’t mean it wasn’t real.
I wiped my own eyes prophylactically. “It’s just, I have to find Mitch. It’s really important for my job. Do you have him?”
This tripped her up. She snapped out of her reverie and turned to look at me, at the place where I was actually standing. “Sweetie, are you sure you aren’t sick? Didn’t you say Mitch was dead?”
“The slide, Mom. From his amygdala. It was in my bag.”
She shook her head the way she used to do when she caught me flirting with the groundskeepers. Amused. Composed. The older, wiser adult who’d watched me closely, and told me stories about who I was. “Are you sure you didn’t leave it at work?”
I went to the mudroom. Before I’d even gotten one boot on, Jonas was there, blocking the door. “Where are you going?”
“Where do you think? The cemetery. I have to retrace my steps.”
“Why don’t we check the lab?”
It was an idiotic idea because I’d brought Mitch home. I knew that. I clearly remembered putting the slide mailer in my glasses case, and I knew for certain he was not in the lab. But Jonas could be so forceful sometimes, especially when I’d lost my cool.
The next thing I knew we were in the car and he was driving, which was a good thing because I was crying so hard I couldn’t see. What had happened in my mother
’s life, really? What had happened to us all that afternoon? When my mother was gone, who would tell me about myself? How would I know I was real?
In the empty lab, we checked the cabinet where Mitch’s case number lived; sure enough, one amygdala slide was missing. We checked adjacent cabinets and the drawers of everyone’s bench. We even checked the freezers, opening boxes at random, digging among frozen slices of brain. The air swirled out at us like an overnight snowstorm in May.
“Where is he?” I wailed. “Where?”
I sank to the floor by my bench and leaned against the drawers, feeling the handles prod my aging back. I let them dig, wanting to hurt. Jonas closed the freezer he was searching and came to sit with me.
“I’ll be fired,” I told Jonas. “This is like embezzlement.”
He pulled me into his lap and began to argue in his lecture hall voice that I was a titan and a lioness and frankly too likable to fire. I wasn’t buying it, but I was soothed, because he was incapable of telling stories he didn’t believe, and somehow he still believed in me. In a lot of ways, and this was one, he really was a lot like my mom.
I sat back to see him seeing me, bracing myself with a hand on the floor. It was slick from a recent washing and my hand slid back under the overhang of my bench. As it did, it brushed against a gap between the cabinet and the floor, and in that gap, a piece of matter. The material was plastic, and of the right shape and size.
“It’s him!” I cried, finally, when the power of speech returned. “It’s him, it’s him, it’s him!”
I got down on my belly and plucked him out into the open. He shot across the alley between the benches, ricocheting off the leg of a stool. I scrambled after him, falling on him just before he came to rest alongside the closest freezer. I had him. I had him in my possession. The slide mailer was filthy, completely covered in dust, having never even left the lab. But clasped inside it, he was safe, ready, still, to work.
Jonas collapsed against me. With my other hand I held his very tight and allowed myself to look into the future. Tomorrow, the embryology techs would thaw number four and within an hour it would be in my womb. We knew so much about it already. In addition to no serious early onset diseases, it had a good chance of above average intelligence, a low chance of being an athlete, light brown hair, blue eyes, a girl. In other words, our child. If it even made it that far.
I closed my eyes and tried to visualize that child, but for obvious reasons all I saw was my mom: her real face, the one I remembered. And then I saw Mitch’s face, which was more or less a fiction, since I’d never met him in person, and then I saw his mother, who I knew only through a screen but who’d lingered after the rest of the family had signed off to tell me a few more stories of her son: how he’d loved oranges, how he’d loved women more than he cared to admit, how he’d been his own person, a loaded weapon beyond her control. And then I saw my own mom again, but this time it was her current face, and then for a second, half a second maybe, but long enough that I’m going to count it, I saw my future child.
It seemed almost irrelevant that there were things that really happened in this world, and other things that didn’t. The could’ve-happened were no less real than the really-happened, which vanished even with proper care.
When I was young, before I went boy-crazy, I liked to take a sketchbook to the campus pastures where I’d crouch by the fence and draw the cows. Briarwood was a women’s college, so there were also horses everywhere, and plenty of campus dogs, not to mention cottontail bunnies, beavers, endless birds, and deer. But the animals I liked observing were the cows. I liked the broad pads of their noses, and the way they conspired to spend half the day lying down, each in her own quiet space. You had privacy as a cow, but you also had support. As a girl, I saw the power in that.
My mother encouraged my interest, buying me books about livestock, even arranging for me to go to the dairy to watch the cows get milked. It must’ve been an old-school place, because they still bred their cows with a bull, and one morning the dairy manager called my mom to tell her that several of the cows were in estrus that day.
She drove me out there, and we joined a few other observers outside a pen where a bored cow was harnessed for the bull. He licked her butt and we laughed, he rested his chin on her rump and we cooed, and then in a flash a thin penis flicked out from his abdomen at the same moment that he reared up on his legs. It was over in a matter of seconds, such a quick motion I barely saw it.
“Wait,” I asked my mom, “was that it?”
“That was it.” Back then her eyes watered with laughter.
It took the second and the third copulations to convince me that what we’d seen was real. I was horrified, and I seem to remember losing my interest in cows.
Time passed, we did other things, and then one day my mother reported that all three cows had calved. By that point my interest must have returned, because we visited the babies right away in the calf barn where they were wrapped in coats in individual dry beds and guarded by a white-footed cat. They groaned for milk, and while they waited, I got to let one suck on my hand.
I think of those cows more often than I ever thought I would. So harsh. Such an event. Such sudden, speedy life—
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many generous people contributed to the writing of this book. Monica McGrath and Emily Piacenza led me to Ron Davis, Tre Johnson, and Doug Nettles, who shared football memories and stories. Terry Schuck and John Trojanowski schooled me on brain science. Bernie Caalim, Courtney Cass, Dick Cass, Lisa Dixon, Margot Stern, and Matt Stern provided access to NFL spaces.
I am indebted to the numerous scholars, journalists, and football players whose books helped me to see this story in context. They include Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam; Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class; Nicholas Dawidoff, Collision Low Crossers: Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football; Rich Eisen, Total Access: A Journey to the Center of the NFL Universe; Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru, League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth; John Feinstein, Next Man Up: A Year Behind the Lines in Today’s NFL; Henry T. Greely, The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction; Nate Jackson, Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile; T.M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God; Greg O’Brien, On Pluto: Inside the Mind of Alzheimer’s; Jeff Pearlman, Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty; Warren Sapp, Sapp Attack: My Story; and Tony Siragusa, Goose: The Outrageous Life and Times of a Football Guy. I absorbed and borrowed a lot from these sources, and from ESPN’s “30 for 30: The U,” HBO’s “The Alzheimer’s Project,” HBO’s “Hard Knocks,” PBS’s “League of Denial,” and especially Michael Robinson’s irresistible YouTube show “The Real Rob Report.”
My first readers—Jennifer Acker, Jonathan Corcoran, Brady Clegg, Elizabeth Farren, Hannah Gersen, Will Harper, John Hill, Freddi Karp, Matt Karp, Alice Mattison, Tom McAllister, Dave Scrivner, Ross Simonini, and Lauren Steffel—gave valuable feedback on early and late drafts.
Adelphi University, the Wertheim Study at the New York Public Library, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Wassaic Project, and the Corporation of Yaddo provided indispensable time and space to write.
Jim Rutman believed in my idiosyncratic vision from the start. I’ll always be grateful to him for his unwavering faith and labor, and to Robert Lasner and Elizabeth Clementson, who ultimately brought this book into the world.
I couldn’t write anything without the support of my friends and family—especially Matt Karp, my partner in spectatorship and everything else. This book has always been for him.
with friends
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