by Meg Howrey
I don’t know that any of this will make a good essay, though. I know good writing is supposed to be showing, not telling, but for the essay it’s not really about showing or telling. It’s about selling. Selling myself as the possibly gender-confused descendent of a false confessor and victim of rye bread–munching hysterics isn’t going to get me into a good college.
And with that thought, Luke pushes himself away from the desk where he has been typing.
Luke slides back (the chair he’s sitting on has casters) to the desk, scrolls through what he has written, and makes a few grammatical changes. Luke does not consider himself to be a writer, but he has writers in his family. His Nana wrote a series of books for young adults called The Mountjoy Girls. His mother, Sara, is writing a book on alternative healing, and contributes articles to various journals. His aunt Nancy has written a book on Lucrezia de’ Medici. His sister Pearl has had her poetry published. His great-aunt Eileen has written a manual on the proper care and training of Dandie Dinmont terriers.
Luke saves his writing under the title “Notes #1.”
He wonders how accurately he has remembered that evening when they all looked at the Bible. Luke was the star pupil of his AP Biology class and is a subscriber to Scientific American, so he understands the basic synaptic principle of memory creation, and that the act of memory retrieval will—to some extent—alter the memory being retrieved. Deprived of the exact stimuli that produced a unique neuronal sequence, cells will reconsolidate in a new way, depending on where and what and who Luke is at the time he remembers. Luke’s brain—presupposing there is a “Luke” separate from his “brain”—can only remember a memory of the memory from the last time he remembered the memory.
Example: Luke did not think of the Plinko game while looking at the Bible that night. He constructed the analogy two years later, under totally different circumstances, but it so exactly suited the bouncing helplessness of looking at three hundred years’ worth of girls’ names that it seemed as if he had always made that connection: that he must have thought of the Plinko game at that moment, and forgotten about it, and that he was—two years later—remembering it at last.
But he wasn’t.
Also, Luke didn’t point at the names in Nana’s family Bible and tell Sara, “I don’t think it means anything.” What he said was, “Yeah,” and then, “Can I have a small piece of cake?” Luke was both alarmed and angered by the revelation of his family history. Luke knew Sara was worried about how he felt, along with feeling bad about losing her temper and yelling at Pearl. Luke wanted cake and knew that if he asked for a specifically small piece, he would get a larger one than if he had not specified the size. Luke could not stop himself from feeling alarm or anger. He could, however, and did, get dessert.
Luke is on the move now, leaving the bedroom for the kitchen. He does not think of the bedroom as “his” bedroom yet, even though his father introduced it to Luke with: “So this is your room.” For four days, Luke has been moving cautiously about his father’s house, putting anything he uses or touches back very carefully. Luke does not stand in his father’s house and shout, “Who are you? What does this mean? Are we supposed to love each other? Why didn’t you ever want to know me before?” Luke puts magazines down at the same angle he picks them up, flattens them into stacks, and says to himself, “I like keeping things neat too.”
“What’s his house like?” Pearl asked Luke by phone the day after Luke’s arrival in Los Angeles. “Is it really fancy?”
“It’s awesome. But it’s not, like, super huge or anything.” Luke looked around the living room where he was standing.
“Well, describe it,” said Pearl.
“Um … it’s really sort of empty.”
“Empty? Like no furniture?”
“No, there’s furniture. But everything is put away inside it. All the stuff. It’s really organized.”
“So it’s impersonal,” Pearl mused. “Cold.”
“Oh no. It’s really nice. No clutter. I’ll take some pictures,” Luke said.
Luke is in the kitchen now, which has all new appliances. He admires the refrigerator particularly, which is full of food in clear containers. His father told him to help himself to anything at all, and so Luke forks broccoli salad into a green rectangular dish. Even the dishes are cool: Japanese style, he thinks. Luke munches broccoli, thinks briefly about sex, which he has never had, and then his jeans pocket rings. It is the new cell phone his father’s assistant, Kati, gave to him. (Kati, who, three seconds before, Luke was imagining sitting naked on top of the kitchen counter.)
There is a text from Luke’s father: Done in 1 hr. C U at home. Evrythng ok? Luke smiles. Mark likes texting. Luke is not used to it because the cell phone plan allotted to him by Sara on his old phone has very limited texting. He likes that Mark texts him about ten times a day, sometimes with information, sometimes with an observation, or a description of what he is doing. Luke types back: Great! See you then. After a moment he changes this to: evrythng cool! C U when.
Luke puts the now empty dish, the fork, and the glass in the dishwasher, closes the door, thinks, takes everything out and washes them by hand over the sink, dries them with a brown dish towel, restacks them in cupboards and drawers.
Luke sees that somehow, in transferring salad from container to bowl, he has left blobs of salad dressing on the marble countertop. Luke grabs a sponge.
Now that he is examining them more closely, Luke thinks that the tiny blobs of dressing look like cells, and the splattered threads of dressing spreading out from the blobs look like the dendrites and axons that extend from a neuron.
Luke separates a dressing axon from a neighboring dressing neuron with the tip of his index finger. He knows that the axons of neurons do not actually touch other surrounding neurons. There is a space between them, a synaptic cleft. This space is where information is relayed from neuron to neuron. Neurotransmitter molecules move across the tiny space (five thousand of which would equal the width of a human hair) to neurotransmitter protein receptors. Electrical signals become chemical signals, and are converted back to electrical signals.
Signals, Luke thinks, sponging up the dressing. He thinks of Nana’s family Bible and conceptualizes the names as cells, the lines connecting the names as dendrites, the spaces between the names as synaptic clefts. Signals, he thinks again. Signals being sent. Signals being sent from a mother to a daughter, then another, then another. Electrical signals. Chemical signals. Luke decides now to take his father’s copy of Fitness magazine outside and look at it on the patio.
It had taken Luke awhile to think through the ramifications of his ancestral history, but once he did it had seemed pretty obvious to him that Sara had sex with his father for the sole purpose of conceiving a third daughter. A Sara in the grips of a mystical idea made more sense to Luke than a Sara who had a random one-night stand. So what happened? Did an embryonic Luke receive signals to become a girl and then ignore them? Refuse in the womb to obey his mother’s electrical and chemical desires to produce a third daughter? Whatever happened, Luke has spent much of his conscious life attempting to correctly read and interpret the signals being sent from one female in his household to another. He is very, very good at it.
Sitting in the California sun, looking at a photograph of a man who appears nearly crazed by his own outsized musculature, and reading an article debating the merits of various protein powders, Luke appreciates the feel of the sun on the tops of his feet, imprecisely imagines sex with Kati (now on all fours with the moon-faced serenity of the Kama Sutra), wonders if he should start drinking protein shakes, thinks about sex again, is slightly disgusted with himself, then not. Luke closes his eyes, visualizes the spaces between the neurons in his brain widening and expanding, no longer synaptic clefts but synaptic seas, with room for swimming, floating on his back, letting the water cover his ears, hearing his heartbeat underwater. Drifting quietly, knowing for a quick second himself to be himself, forgetting all his n
ames.
Luke cannot quite believe he is where he is, and for a moment he wishes the summer already over: hours running logged, essay written, father known. Questions begin to form, and so Luke opens his eyes and returns to the article about supplements. He wonders what doubling up on his protein intake would do to his body chemistry and if doing so would make him look more like his father, who is extremely muscular.
CHAPTER TWO
Okay, new plan is to think out stuff for my essay while running, therefore accomplishing two things at one time, instead of letting my mind drift. I don’t want to have to worry about writing. It’s enough that I’ve got to answer all these emails from my family.
The conditions for running here are really great: sun without humidity, hills, near-absence of bugs in the eyes, cool stuff to look at. The section of Los Angeles that Mark lives in is called Beachwood Canyon. It’s not a scary-rich-looking neighborhood, but a lot of the houses have signs outside them saying they have video surveillance provided by Bel-Air security.
Mark said he could arrange for the studio to send him a car service, and then I could use his car when he’s working. They added another week that he didn’t anticipate, and he seems worried that I’ll be bored or feel stranded, or something. We keep having odd conversations where he’ll ask, “So you, like, drive and everything, right? Do you want a car?” And I’ll say, “Do you mean … like … what do you mean?” and he’ll say, “I missed all your Christmases and birthdays. Can I buy you a car?” and then we’ll both sort of laugh. I told him about Vlad the Impala, and said I would be nervous to drive anything that wasn’t already on the short list for the Grim Auto Reaper.
Anyway, we are going to do more stuff together once the show is finished shooting and he has his “hiatus.” Yesterday, though, he had a day off and he took me out to Santa Monica beach. Oh yeah, I could tell my family about that. Of course, what they all want to know is how I feel about everything, and what it’s all like, how I am experiencing it. That’s called “qualia” in philosophy of mind. Qualia is the way things seem to us. It’s one of my favorite words.
What’s the qualia of being with my father?
I always knew I had a father, obviously, but we’ve just never had any dads around. Actually I think most people assume that all three of us kids come from Sara’s ex-husband. I don’t look like my sisters, but they don’t totally look like each other either. All of us look a little bit like Sara, especially Aurora.
Sara had a simile for the way we should think about my sisters’ father. Paul was like a caterpillar that had become a butterfly.
“You’re not sad for a butterfly that isn’t a caterpillar anymore, you’re happy for it,” Sara said.
It wasn’t always possible for Sara to get other people—divorce lawyers, for example—to accept this kind of explanation, so my uncle Louis—who wasn’t my uncle then, he was just our next-door neighbor in New York—helped Sara with the paperwork and she was divorced by reason of “desertion” as opposed to “metamorphosis.” On Sara’s advice, Aurora, Pearl, and I use the phrase “moved on” when referring to Paul, which we don’t often do.
I knew my father’s name: Anthony. In New York City, the building my family lived in came with a doorman who was also named Anthony. I don’t have any memory of this doorman personally, but I do remember the sucking air sound that happened when he pulled open the glass entrance doors of our building, and so I guess I’ve always connected the name Anthony with that sucking air sound. The other thing Sara would say about my father was that he was young and beautiful: “Like an angel,” is what she said.
Sara didn’t tell me to think of my father as a butterfly, but more as someone who was on his own path, a path that did not include fathering in any sort of tangible way, and that I should choose to honor that path, whatever and wherever it might be. And according to Nana, we all had a father in the Lord.
In actual fact, I saw my father in two movies (The Fast Lane and Night Begins Now), without knowing at the time that it was my father I was seeing. Of course I had no way of knowing that Anthony Boyle had become Mark Franco, the guy who plays “Miggs,” the rookie cop who spills coffee all over himself when Laura Laughton smiles at him in Night Begins Now.
My father has told me a little bit about his acting. It took him awhile to get famous. At first he only got small parts like Prison Inmate, or Drug Dealer. Then he said he started really working out hard and his roles got bigger as he did. He’s played race-car drivers, assassins, bodyguards, Navy Seals. He’s been in a ton of movies.
The Last is a futuristic drama where he plays the role of James Knox: an ex-military astronaut who struggles to lead a band of survivors abandoned by their own government to a place of refuge where they might be able to make contact with the resistance faction still thought to be circling the planet. (The planet is Earth, which has been partially destroyed by nuclear war and where strange things happen due to high radiation levels.) It actually makes sense if you watch it from the beginning.
The Last is the number-one network television drama now. But even when my father began appearing on magazine covers, sides of buses, billboards, Sara failed to recognize him. She doesn’t really notice stuff like that. Also, she didn’t have any photographs of him around to remind her of what he looked like, and their actual time together had been pretty brief.
Then, about four months ago, Sara got a call. And it was my dad. He said he wanted to get back in touch. If that was okay.
That’s what Sara told me when I got back from working that night. I was standing in the kitchen making myself a sandwich and Sara came in and asked me to sit down with her. “So something has happened,” is how she started.
“Really?” I asked, when she finished. “Wow,” I think I said. I felt a little dizzy, even though I was sitting down, but I had also done a ton of yard work, and was very hungry.
“I know,” Sara said. “We didn’t talk for that long but he’s … lovely. Just like I remembered. I think there’s something very … beautiful here.”
Sara held out a piece of paper. In my mother’s language, “beautiful” can mean many different things. Sometimes it means that something is very beautiful. Sometimes it means that something is awful, and it’s the process of understanding that something, and treating it with compassion and love, that is beautiful. I looked at the paper.
“Mark Franco,” Sara had written, with a phone number underneath that.
“Wait, who’s this?” I asked.
“That’s him.” Sara tapped the paper. “Anthony. He changed his name. He said it might be easier if you—we—just all call him Mark.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay. Why?”
“He’s an actor. He lives in Los Angeles. He wanted to know if I thought you would like to talk to him. I said I couldn’t speak for you but that I thought you would.”
“I would,” I said. “I do.”
I looked at the phone.
“Well, it’s probably too late to call now,” I said.
“There’s a time difference,” Sara pointed out. “It’s earlier there.”
“Maybe I’ll call tomorrow,” I said. I thought maybe I should eat first, and think things over. The first time you talk to your actual real-life father you want to be calm.
“Luke? Are you okay, sweetie? This is a lot to take in.”
“I’m okay. I’m just …”
“I know,” Sara said. “I am too.”
She got up and put her hands on my shoulders. Among other things, Sara is a Reiki Master. I didn’t experience healing rays or lightning bolts of clarity or anything like that, but Sara has nice strong hands. I asked her to tell Nana about the whole thing because I wasn’t quite sure of what my face was doing and because I knew Sara could use someone to talk to about it. It felt weird that I was still hungry, and weird that I still ate my sandwich and did things like flossing my teeth before I went to bed.
I didn’t sleep much that night and I woke up really early.
> “Your mother told me there was a telephone call,” was what Nana said to me, at breakfast.
“My father.” I tried to make it sound casual.
“Well,” said Nana.
I waited.
“The Lord makes a tapestry of our lives.” Nana glanced at the ceiling and smiled approvingly, as if she were giving Him a thumbs-up for His needlework.
“Your mother and I trust your judgment, Luke. And you and your father are in my prayers.”
Then we worked on her crossword puzzle as usual. Well, I was a little distracted, so I didn’t contribute much. But Nana is very good at crosswords. Even though she is someone who believes that the sudden materialization of my father after seventeen years of absence is the work of a first-century mystic, she is also someone who knows the seven-letter word for the currency of Malaysia.
It was a Saturday, so Sara was at yoga class. I had a ton of homework to do, which I did while waiting for it to be late enough to reasonably call California. I thought about what message I would leave if I got his voicemail, and decided NOT to leave one if that happened, but my father answered his phone on the second ring.
“Hello!”
“Hi. Hello. Is this, um … Mark?”
“Luke.”
“Yeah. Hi. I mean, hi. It’s Luke.”
“Hi. I’m … hi.”
“Hi,” I said, starting to laugh, forgetting what I had planned to say. “Hi Mark, I’m Luke.”
“Hey Luke,” my father said, laughing too. “Hey Luke, I’m Mark.”
Later that afternoon Sara came home and I told her about the conversation. I didn’t tell her that I had spent most of the day doing research online about my father. I hadn’t ever seen The Last, but I had heard about it. It was a strange thing, looking at all those pictures and saying to myself, “That’s my dad.” And also, “That extremely good-looking guy who is massively ripped is … my dad?” and, “That’s the guy I just talked to on the phone. Who is my dad.”