by Tom Stern
“Can I help you?” Walter finally asked, taking the man’s bone-thin arm in his hand and guiding him down. Once settled, Benjamin gestured a shaky, jagged hand with fingers curled, towards the chair across the desk from him.
“Just on the floor,” Benjamin said, in regards to the stack of books currently occupying the seat.
It took Walter three rounds to relocate the books before he could finally sit.
“Your brother has an amazing mind,” Benjamin finally started in.
“I don’t understand why he’s not here…” Walter interjected, hoping to avoid whatever surely gradual path Benjamin would take to the actual topic that brought them here.
“That’s the funny thing, you see,” Benjamin shot back. “I assumed he would have been in contact with you. He always seemed so deeply invested in your relationship.”
“Can we slow down a moment?” asked Walter, well aware of the irony of his choice of words but nevertheless needing to start back at the beginning, a point in this story that everyone at Harvard seemed to forget needed to be covered. “Who are you, exactly?”
“At the risk of arrogance, I would call myself his mentor,” Benjamin replied. “Not that there’s much to teach that boy about business. But he does still have a lot to learn about fitting all that he knows into the real world around him.”
“What are you…” Walter began before deciding to keep things as simple as possible. “Why isn’t he here?”
“He graduated early,” Benjamin explained, seemingly baffled that Walter did not know this.
“So now he’s just…what? Where?”
“That’s the funny thing of it. He gave me very explicit instructions regarding the sharing of information involving his whereabouts and future plans.”
“What were those instructions?” Walter frowned.
“Not to share any such information with anyone under any circumstances.”
“I’m sorry,” Walter circled back to a point he thought had been resolved, but clearly had not, “but who are you, exactly?”
“I am exactly Dr. Benjamin Wilkes-Guipp. I am an economist and a philosopher. Some would say one of the world’s most influential. But some would say I’m just a crusty old lout. So I guess you’ll need to make up your own mind in that regard.”
“Well, Dr. Wilkes-Guipp, what my brother and I have been through together is not something one just disregards…” Walter trailed off.
“You understand my astonishment, then, at the fact that he did not share his plans with you.”
“I am family,” Walter smiled dismissively. “I am his brother.”
“As such, I assumed he would have spoken with you.”
Benjamin grimaced, then, and pursed his lips. He cast his stare off in thought for a few seconds before reaching slowly into his desk drawer and fumbling about, eventually and inelegantly retrieving a familiar gray envelope and placing it in one of the few open spaces on his dusty desk.
Walter stared at the envelope a moment before clarifying, “He told you to give that to me?”
“He did not,” Benjamin said curtly. “He gave it to me. And he told me not to open it unless I felt that I had to.”
Now Walter cast his stare off a good long moment before asking, “Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Exactly. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Well, surely we don’t know that. Besides, Wallace more or less always makes sense. Which is precisely why I would have to assume that this makes sense even if it seems not to.”
“I’m sorry, but who are you, exactly?” Walter circled back yet again to this same question, clearly still not satisfied with the answers he had received to it.
“What I can tell you,” Benjamin went on, “is that Wallace is doing exceptionally well.”
“Can you repeat for me what, exactly, the guidelines were that Wallace left you?”
“What is it that you’re really trying to know here, Mr. Braum?” countered Benjamin, a strain of exasperation finding its way into his tone.
“I want to know why,” Walter fired back, countering Benjamin’s exasperation with his own.
“Why what?” Benjamin insisted. “I require that my students be specific with their lines of inquiry. It generates more meaningful results.”
“I’m not your student.”
“That is dependent purely upon whether or not I have something to teach you, now isn’t it? And, I suppose, upon your openness to learning.”
“With all due respect, Dr. Wilkes-Guipp…”
“Benjamin is fine.”
“Fuck you, Benjamin! He’s my fucking brother!”
“Just please don’t use any of the diminutives associated with my first name,” Benjamin stated warmly. “I find those so terribly pedestrian.”
An awkward silence set in.
“Do you have any family, Benjamin?” Walter seethed.
“I will ask you again, Mr. Braum, in the interest of efficiency, what specifically do you aim to come to know here?” Benjamin answered politely.
“I want to know where my brother is,” Walter could not help but yell.
“I suspect that the question you are asking, if answered, would not provide the answers you are truly seeking,” Benjamin matched Walter’s yell.
“How do you know anything about what I’m seeking? We just met!” Walter kept yelling.
“Well, by way of demonstration, I know your brother said he would contact you three months after your last concert,” Benjamin explained as he brought his voice back down to a civil tone. “But it has been more than eight months since you last spoke. And yet, you’re only just now showing up here to find him. At first I thought this might suggest you felt guilt or shame that so much time had passed. But given the nature of our conversation thus far, I no longer suspect this as the core motivation that brought you here.” As Benjamin went on, his voice lowered even further into a gentle tone. “When I factor in, however, the knowledge that you’re likely still quite conflicted as to how to define your individual creative identity in relationship to market forces, your potential motivation starts to take on some color for me. You fear that leveraging marketing and communication strategies to build an audience for your creative work might be disingenuous. But you also suspect that perhaps most everything in our world is ultimately disingenuous anyway, so it might make no difference at all that this is, too. But I find it doubtful that you would come all this way to ask your brother for help. That simply is not in your nature at all. Now, I also know that you have a history of treating those around you with an outraged hostility similar to that which you have displayed here today. I know that this recurs in a somewhat circular pattern for you, a pattern that has slowed a bit since stripping your life of nearly every complicated element, but it’s a pattern nevertheless. However, this anger causes you to isolate, not to reach out. So you have not come here out of anger.” Benjamin’s voice was downright placid by now. “Lastly, then, I know that you want your music, and in turn your life, to feel authentic but you fear that nothing exists without at least some element of edifice. So you fear that you, too, might be nothing more than edifice, when stripped down to your core. Now, by way of deduction, induction, and reasonable speculation based on the aforementioned elements alone, I can pinpoint only one truly plausible, albeit surprising, explanation. Much to my astonishment, I’m confident that you travelled from the city with which you so identify to find your brother, from whom you want so desperately to remain distinct, to satisfy a burdensome longing to participate in the admittedly quite unique version of family that the two of you share. I further suspect that this bond provides much, much more than just a simple sense of belonging for you two as it is rooted in a commonality of experience that literally no other two people on this planet can truly understand. Now, some might argue that your motives could
be a multifaceted, nuanced, and undifferentiated amalgamation of thoughts and feelings, but inasmuch as you have a tendency to want to view the world as a place of absolutes, this explanation seems too cute for me. I do think you are tangled up in a nebulous cloud of uncertainty on this topic, which is why you’re so defensive when asked to simply hone your point of inquiry in an effort to understand what you really seek. But an unexpectedly admirable and consistent aspect of your person, Walter Braum, seems to be that you will act so as to discover. Most people will only act upon what they think they know. And for this reason, I find my singular interpretation of your behavior a far more compelling and fitting explanation. “So,” Benjamin summed up tidily, “that is what I know. I do apologize for the parts that were curt. I can be a little arrogant when challenged.”
As much as Walter wanted to deprive Benjamin the satisfaction of the silence that was currently spreading into every last particle of air around them, Walter nevertheless failed to conjure so much as a single word to mind by way of a response to this painfully detailed analysis, even though there were countless points within it that he cared deeply to address.
Benjamin gave the desk a playful pat and declared, “I will make us tea while you think all of that through.” He then began a wrestling match between his chair, gravity, balance, and his atrophied muscles.
By the time Benjamin made his eventual way past Walter’s chair, patting his visitor on the shoulder affectionately, Walter was still losing his battle with the silence. And sadly, this same silence persisted all the way into the clang of two cups and saucers placed upon the desk and the start-stop of hot water being poured by a frail hand. Right about then, after what very well could have been several days passed, a question solidified in Walter’s mind. So he spoke it out loud.
“Why did he choose not to tell me where he is?”
“An interesting and far more specific question,” Benjamin delighted, as he took a sip of his tea and started the glacial journey of returning the cup to its saucer. “But one we can merely speculate upon, as we have no concrete answers.”
Benjamin gave Walter an excited smile before continuing.
“Wallace’s core shortcoming is his inability to identify his own motivations and psychology with anything even approaching the precision and power with which he can see the desires and behaviors of others both individually and in aggregate. This is why understanding the world is so easy for him, but living in it is so difficult.”
Walter took these words in with a frown. “Wallace doesn’t struggle with anything in life,” he corrected.
Benjamin stopped to carefully consider this point before eventually emitting a contemplative and inquisitive noise that sounded like “hmm.”
“What?” asked Walter.
“What what?” Benjamin provoked, a sharpness snapping back into his tone.
“What is that reaction about?” Walter amended his question.
So Benjamin acquiesced. “I am contemplating the potential significance, to our current line of conjecture, of the fact that you don’t see one of your brother’s central fallibilities as a person.”
“Why?”
“Why what, Mr. Braum?” Benjamin barked, again quite frustrated with his new student’s lack of intellectual discipline.
“Why do you find that telling?”
“Because it suggests a highly plausible reason why he has not contacted you regarding his whereabouts.”
“What are you…” Walter raised a hand to create a pause in which to rephrase. “Two questions. Number one: What is that highly plausible reason? And number two: In what evidence are you grounding your findings?”
Benjamin smiled and nodded slightly in approval, or maybe his head was just bobbing a bit as a result of the old man’s general shakiness, before casting his stare off in thought and settling into a pregnant silence that stretched on for at least a minute, maybe two.
Just as Walter could stand the discomfort of this quiet no longer, just as he was pursing his lips to speak, Benjamin took in a long, slow breath and said, “I will answer only one of those questions.”
He then reached out and picked up the gray envelope from atop his desk and tremulously fought it back into his desk drawer, which he locked with a small key that Walter had previously failed to notice was resting in the lock. Benjamin then removed the previously invisible key and placed it in his pocket.
“Finish your tea,” he instructed, looking warmly up at Walter who stared back in full flummox.
“What are you doing?”
“I am sitting in my chair,” Benjamin yelled, quite fed up by now.
“What are you… What is in that envelope?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then why did you lock it in your drawer?”
“Because I think I know what is in it. And if I’m right, I don’t want you to have it.”
“What is in the…” Walter rephrased, “What do you think is in the envelope?”
“I imagine it must be Wallace’s geographical whereabouts,” Benjamin answered plainly.
“But that makes no sense,” Walter shot back.
“It makes perfect sense, actually.”
“You already know his geographical location.”
“I most certainly do not.”
“But you said that he was doing well,” Walter spat, angrily.
“What does the how in this case have to do with the where?” Benjamin fired right back. “That was a stupid assumption on your part, the kind of lazy thinking you will need to unlearn if you’re going to resolve this situation for yourself.”
“Can I please just have the envelope?” Walter asked.
“I think my actions have made my answer to that question abundantly clear.”
“Can I please have the envelope?” Walter insisted this time.
Benjamin did not feel the need to reply any further.
“So that’s it, then?” Walter explained.
“If that is it,” Benjamin confirmed.
Walter stared at the wrinkly, old man a bit longer. Then he got up and headed for the door.
“You are forgetting,” Benjamin declared, annoyed yet again with Walter’s lack of intellectual discipline, “that I have offered to answer one of your questions.”
“Fuck the questions,” Walter replied, pausing at the door but refusing to turn back.
“You are a silly man, Mr. Braum. Your actions so often belie your words.”
“I’m a silly man?” Walter repeated rhetorically.
Benjamin chuckled before continuing. “The first question is the one I will answer by explaining that I find it highly plausible that Wallace did not get in touch with you for the same reason he did not get in touch with anyone but me. Namely, because he feared that you would not know how to accept his future life circumstances.”
“What future life circumstances?” Walter turned back to face Benjamin, even though he knew better than to think that the man would suddenly start providing satisfying answers to his questions.
“Even you know precisely what to expect from Wallace’s future,” stated Benjamin, entirely comfortable with the insulting undertones of his statement. “Success beyond all measure.”
Walter pondered this thought for just a moment before replying, with a similarly condescending tone, “So your grand assessment is that Wallace has disappeared from everyone that cares about him in preparation for being successful?”
“Inelegantly stated,” Benjamin answered, “but yes.”
“That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard,” Walter derided. “Who struggles with success?”
“Well,” answered Benjamin, all but laughing at what he perceived as either naiveté or stupidity, “most everyone. We human beings resent all success that is not our own. That is just plain. And such resentment would drive a gentle soul like Wall
ace absolutely mad.”
Even though this thought stuck Walter like a sizable thorn and sunk his heart under its weight, he nevertheless disregarded it as a silly little trifle of a generality.
“I will tell you now the same thing I told your brother the last time I saw him,” Benjamin added. “If one wants the answers to his questions badly enough, then he will stop at nothing to find them, Mr. Braum. That is just plain. And simple.”
Walter had no idea what this feeble old man was still going on about. Or he did and he wasn’t interested in conceding even the tiniest fragment of it. So Walter shook his head, turned, and left.
4.
When Walter returned from Cambridge, he went right to Mayne Ridge Park.
It was sundown.
He settled in for the night. But for the first time ever, he didn’t really feel like being there.
“These stars are getting too bright for me,” he sighed to himself as he closed his eyes and pulled Millie into his chest, interlocking his arms around her. He wasn’t really sure what this utterance was supposed to mean.
But the next day, he found himself renting a modest loft to live in. It was little more than four walls, a roof, and a floor, but he liked it well enough and he slept better at night. He even bought a mattress. And some dishes and cups.
And a guitar stand.
He set the stand in the corner of the loft furthest from the door, and as he placed Millie on it, he felt a little bit of worry lift from his chest, now that she had a safe place in the world. He checked his watch. Shoop Shoop Records was open. But he found himself going somewhere else instead.
The first time Walter showed up at the library, he wasn’t even sure what brought him there, really. He started by searching for some books on music, on songwriting, on playing guitar. Surprisingly, he struggled to focus on them for sustained stretches of time. He found his mind kept drifting off, until eventually he found himself scanning through the periodical racks until he landed on a publication called the Business Weekly Journal. He took the thick document, which he had never heard of, back to the table at which he had been working and leafed its pristine pages. Its language was dense and impenetrable. Its charts and graphs were all but incomprehensible. Its article headlines were bone dry, stripped of any interest or allure. But for some reason, Walter was determined to keep reading.