We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  His father nodded. They walked to the station.

  “You didn’t make it to church.”

  “That was just as good,” he said, pointing toward the coffee shop.

  He watched his father walk off to get the newspaper; then he took a seat in the shade on the cool concrete bench and pulled a book out of his backpack. Thoughts of his father walking home alone to the empty house kept distracting him, so that he had read only a single page when the horn announced the approaching train, but in his flurried efforts to put his book away and get his baggage settled before the train arrived, he was able to forget about his father entirely.

  65

  One morning in October, she went to turn the television on for him and found that there was no picture. The repairman couldn’t come in right away, and she had to go to work. She left Ed on the couch, knowing he’d have nothing to do but sit and think. She couldn’t imagine how he’d pass his day without television to distract him from his thoughts.

  She hardly got anything done. She must have called him half a dozen times. Every time she called, he hurried off, saying very little, as if he had to get back to something.

  When she came home, she found him sitting in exactly the spot she’d left him in on the couch. She wondered if it were possible that he’d sat there for nine hours straight. She checked the microwave and the refrigerator. At least he’d risen to eat. Evidence of urine on the floor of the powder room gave her spirits a strange lift. She was glad she’d called and made him get up.

  Another day passed in the same way, and then the repairman finally came on the morning of the third day, before she went to work.

  It turned out that all he had to do was reprogram something on the television and the cable box. She gave him a forty-dollar tip on top of the fee his company charged.

  “If I ever need you again, please put me at the top of the list.” She tried to affect a breezy manner to hide the desperation she felt. “We simply can’t get on without television in this house.”

  66

  Connell stayed up all night trying to finish Crime and Punishment in time for class. In the predawn hours, as he battled fatigue and a fractured consciousness that felt, appropriately given the book in question, something like “brain fever,” the story took on a diabolical urgency, and his experience of it became more personal. It felt as if it could have been the story of the mental collapse of any college-aged kid under pressure, or at least any kid far from home, huddled under a Siberian chill.

  At nine o’clock he put his head down to rest his eyes for five minutes. The next thing he knew, the clock said ten fifty and he was scrambling not to be late for his eleven o’clock class. He was once again grateful he’d put in for a single room, because the dorm with the most singles, while being a Brutalist eyesore, also happened to be close to campus.

  He threw some clothes on and dashed down the stairs, jumping five or six steps at a time and coming down hard on the landings. He ran through the courtyard of the structure—which was designed by a prison architect and seemed to be made entirely of concrete—and marveled, as he did every day, at how violently it clashed with the neo-Gothic elegance of so much of the campus. He had missed breakfast again. With two classes back-to-back, he would miss lunch as well. He had wasted so many meals in his plan that he could hardly tell the difference anymore between hunger pangs and pangs of guilt. He ate often at the Medici, the Florian, or Salonica, because the theater people he hung around with went to those places before and after practice. They staked out a table and sat at it in shifts all night.

  He ran past Rockefeller Chapel and onto the quad. The sprint across the length of the campus to Cobb took his breath away, and by the time he arrived he was panting hard. There was a time when this run would have been nothing to him, but when he decided to pursue the life of the mind, he stopped taking care of his body. He considered it a noble choice, except when he examined the evidence that he was falling apart. His muscle mass had melted away considerably. He was long and lanky and now almost certainly too thin. Instead of gaining the traditional fifteen pounds, he had probably lost twenty. He figured he looked like he was taking drugs, though in fact he was scared to try any. It would have been enough that his father had been a drug researcher, but on top of that, in his father’s Alzheimer’s he had an up-close example of the effects of haywire brain chemistry. He didn’t want to do anything to damage his brain. Of course, he understood that sleep deprivation was as ruinous as many drugs. The strongest drug he ever took was caffeine. He drank coffee throughout the day, enough to make him faintly jittery most of the time. He had a thick eraser of fifties-style hair, and his glasses were big, plastic, and chunky and looked like a stage prop. Once October bled into November, the weather provided the model for the persona so many around him cultivated: brisk, astringent, clarifying, with intermittent flashes of manic warmth.

  He paused in front of Cobb to catch his breath and gaze at the indefatigable smokers, who stood in the mouth of the big stone C-Bench in any weather, puffing at Galoises and Lucky Strikes, anything unfiltered, to hurry the heat into their lungs. In the winter, with puffs of condensation escaping lips, everyone on campus looked like a smoker.

  • • •

  In class, he took a seat at the round table, and then he was snapped awake to see the class all looking at him. The professor had called on him to speculate about what motive Raskolnikov might have had for the killing, beyond his stated philosophical one. Connell replied that he wondered whether Raskolnikov might not have been struggling through some kind of Oedipal problem. His father was dead; there was tremendous pressure on Raskolnikov to succeed, to provide a life for his sister and mother. He had his landlady at his back, a surrogate mother figure. Maybe the pawnbroker was herself a surrogate for those unresolved feelings.

  The professor, a Russian American with a Mephistophelian goatee, had an amused smile on his face. This had happened before—slumbers of Connell’s punctuated by sudden outbursts of insight. Connell figured either that the professor possessed that elusive quality, the so-called Russian soul, or else that he had been similarly sleep-deprived at one point in his career himself. Something had allowed him to understand Connell’s bizarrely derelict behavior as an expression of authentic scholarship. Certainly it would have been harder on Connell if he didn’t do the reading. But to fall asleep like that in class, in brazen view of the instructor, and spring awake to provide a take that the other students seemed to chew thoughtfully on, even if they wore looks of scorn or pity: this seemed to strike the professor as being a natural mode for the study of Dostoyevsky.

  Connell couldn’t help it. He never got enough sleep. He would drift off standing up, sometimes midconversation. If he leaned against a wall too long he would lose his legs and nearly topple over. There was so much to read, and the conversations he found himself in often lasted deep into the night. He watched the night owls go to sleep and pressed on.

  Class let out and he went outside for the few minutes between classes to stand in front of the building. He spotted that professor he always saw with his son, a redheaded boy about four or five years old. He watched them walk across campus hand in hand, the professor gesturing around at something, the two of them stopping to watch a squirrel slip down the sloped lid of a garbage can and land in a crash of plastic containers.

  He wished he had his own father with him. They could share an apartment off campus. His father could wander the grounds all day and they could meet for dinner. His father could trail him to classes. He would love the state-of-the-art labs, the brilliant students, the sense of higher purpose. His father had never gotten to hang out on a campus like this, though he’d always maintained that all campuses, in spirit, were essentially the same, that the differences between classes of institutions were more in degree than in kind.

  After his second class, Connell want back to the dorm and did a little work. Then he went to dinner and rehearsal. He had gotten the part of Orlando in As You Like It, becaus
e his experience as a debater had lent him a certain rhetorical polish. The problem was, he didn’t know how to be anybody but himself, and he wasn’t sure what that self was yet, so he studied other people for traits to grab and fashion a personality out of. He liked to think this was what all college kids did, but when he ran into one of those hale, relaxed young men whose character, in the Heraclitean sense, seemed carved out at birth for him, he felt foolish and guilty. It helped that the character he was playing in As You Like It was a little naïve, because he could be breathless and overwhelmed up there and it would just about make sense.

  They had spent a week choreographing the fight scenes, which were the only parts of the play he had any mastery of. He hadn’t exercised in months—was it a full year now?—but he still had a wiry energy, and he executed the flips with an ease that made him embarrassed about the rest of his performance. His father would have enjoyed watching him practice the fight scenes. He loved swashbuckling movies about adventures on the high seas, and World War II flicks with buddies fighting side by side and striding into danger.

  The cast went to the Medici afterward. He found himself in the middle of a spirited conversation about the nature of free will. Several people packed into the booth, jamming him against the wall. The girls, Jenna included—Jenna whom he’d made out with a few times and who was on the verge of agreeing to make it exclusive—doted on a stage crew member whose carpentry skills lent him a virtuous concreteness in the abstracted arena of campus life.

  Hopped up on an endless series of coffee refills, Connell was eating a plate of baked ravioli and idly playing with one of the sugar packets in the little tray when he was overtaken by an insight into the nature of time and space that made his mind fairly crackle. All at once, he could see the whole chain of hands through which this packet had passed on its journey to him. He could see the sugar cane growing, being gathered, being refined. He could see its manufacture. He was about to enact its consumption. He could see the future too: the packet heading to the landfill, decaying in the earth, disintegrating. In one moment, the packet in his hands didn’t exist yet, and in another he was holding it, and in another its remnants were sitting in the trash bag waiting for pickup. He knew he wouldn’t be able to explain it to anyone if he tried. The other actors were now carrying on some kind of debate about Williams, O’Neill, and Miller, and Connell was there and not there. He thought, Domino Sugar. Dad made the sugar that went into packets like this. He is holding one of these now, in the past. He could see his father looking into the future and seeing the blurred outlines of a life, a wife, a child. His father would be dead and in the ground. Connell would be too. The sugar would keep getting made.

  He wanted to call his father and tell him his fevered thoughts, but he knew that even under the best of circumstances it wouldn’t have made sense to anyone, and it surely wasn’t going to make sense to his father now in the state he was in. Still, he wanted badly to share this insight, and he could feel it slipping away. There wasn’t even time to turn to the guy next to him and try to get it across, so he just formed a mental picture of his father as a much younger man, standing in a white smock, holding a clipboard, as he squeezed the sugar packet and sent the thought to that young man in his image, wherever he was in space or time. He ripped the packet open, poured it in, and watched it dissolve.

  The director of his play had seen his polish and misunderstood. She hadn’t realized that polish was all he had. He could stand before people and make stentorian declamations, but the only reason he could project a convincing air of youthful ignorance was that he was stuck inside himself, and he knew he was—it was the one thing he could say with real conviction that he knew about himself—and he wasn’t playing a part.

  • • •

  The next morning, he woke up late again and bounded down the stairs, but this time he came down too hard on the landing and felt something snap. He hobbled to class and then to the hospital, and that night, when he showed up at rehearsal on crutches, with a broken foot, it was as if the director had been waiting for this to happen all along. There was no understudy, of course, so Connell had to play the part himself. They had to rechoreograph the fight scenes, which he and his counterpart had brought to such a high level of polish that someone suggested that when he recovered they should put on an avant-garde show that would consist exclusively of them playing out their grapplings over and over. They turned them into arm-wrestling scenes instead.

  Connell felt safer, somehow, up on crutches. He had to practice walking around onstage in them, and the new physical demands of the part took the urgent edge off his desperation to remember his lines, which allowed him finally to get off book right before the show went up. It was pure chance that he’d broken his foot, but it was lovely to imagine that it wasn’t merely chance, that there was a higher order working in life, that the mystical flashes of insight born of staring at a packet of sugar in a noisy restaurant might actually connect to a truth of the universe. It was lovely to consider the possibility that he’d been somewhere else with his father, in another neighborhood of time and space, just because he’d been able to conceive of it while watching some crystals dissolve into a coffee cup.

  He had to remember to give the old man a call.

  67

  After the eleven o’clock Mass, they took a walk through the neighborhood, then went to the Food Emporium. They were having the Coakleys over for dinner, and she needed to pick up a few things. As they passed through the first electronic door heading out of the store, Ed came to a halt in the vestibule and started yelling “No! No!”

  “Not now,” she said. “We have to get home.”

  “Not with her!” he yelled. “Police!”

  She yanked his hand. He grabbed on to the sliding door to pull back. Somehow he managed to hold on to the bags.

  “We have to go,” she said. “Please!”

  “Not with you! Police! Police!”

  She pulled harder. He stumbled two steps and threw himself to the ground. The cantaloupe he was carrying spilled out of its bag and rolled into the street. She couldn’t budge him. At first people gave her curious looks as they passed, but then a few stopped to gawk, and then a crowd gathered as Ed continued to call for the police. She offered them sheepish smiles as they thronged around her. Workers from the store came out. Someone must have called 911, because the next thing she knew two officers were parting the crowd.

  “Police!” Ed shouted frantically when he saw them.

  “The police are here,” she said desperately. “Shut up.”

  The flash of anger didn’t help her cause. She told them she was his wife, but Ed’s continued shouting made them question her. A neatly dressed woman in a shearling coat whom Eileen had never seen before came forward from the crowd and said she knew who she was. “I see her around,” the woman said quietly, as if to downplay the connection. “In church. She takes care of him. It’s not abuse.”

  Eileen was relieved, but she felt a profound gravity come over her at the thought of what a spectacle she’d become. The police were mollified by this character witness; one of the officers told the crowd to disperse, while the other asked what was wrong with Ed and whether she had anyone to call for assistance. In her confusion she could think of no one, not a neighbor, not a single friend.

  “You don’t have anyone to call?”

  “I don’t know anyone around here,” she found herself saying, to her own amazement. The officers looked heavily at each other, as if they had been conscripted into helping her move a roomful of books. They hooked arms under Ed and led him to the car.

  When they got home, she called the Coakleys to cancel. He was raving about how he wasn’t going to eat anything from her, he wasn’t going to eat a single thing she gave him. Eventually she convinced him to go upstairs to the bedroom, and he fell asleep.

  “Wasn’t it wonderful?” he asked a few hours later when she woke him to give him his medicine. “We had such a nice day.”

  “What ar
e you talking about?”

  “Didn’t we have a wonderful day?”

  After dinner, Ed went right back to bed. She returned to the kitchen and opened the wine she’d bought for the Coakleys’ visit. She’d consulted the salesman to make sure it was a bottle to satisfy an exacting taste. For the last few years, Jack Coakley had been educating himself about wine. He was becoming—he’d taught her the word—an oenophile. The salesman had handed her a Bordeaux whose label she didn’t recognize and said it had big mouthfeel, with strong but creamy tannins, a blend of fruity aromas, and a smoky finish. She’d nodded and tried not to seem lost. It had been more money than she’d planned on spending, and she’d thought about getting a cheaper bottle she was familiar with, but the way he’d looked at her, seeming to evaluate her, had made her carry it up to the counter.

  When she was nearly done with the bottle, she called Cindy.

  “I almost went to jail,” she said. “And he’s saying, ‘Didn’t we have a wonderful time?’ ” She drained the last glass. “This is the best bottle of wine I’ve ever tasted.”

  She hung up and began eating her way through the food in the refrigerator—the hors d’oeuvres she’d bought for dinner, leftovers, the cake she’d made that morning.

  She felt the tremors of an incipient headache. The headaches were the reason she stayed away from alcohol. She could see the appeal of it, though: the obliteration of the day’s concerns, the loosing of the reins of control, the preoccupation with something as simple as the next drink, the forgetting. The forgetting could be wonderful.

  68

  Eileen knew facing the crowds and the cold might not be a good idea—Ed was more sensitive to cold than he’d ever been, and the excess stimulation might put him in a frenzy—but she couldn’t help herself. Though they’d gone every year they lived in Jackson Heights, she hadn’t been to see the Christmas windows on Fifth Avenue since she’d moved to Bronxville. She was loath to miss them again.