The Unknowns

by Gabriel Roth

  I give a little nod of concession and get up, shaking with disloyalty, to clear the plates and fetch the ice cream. There’s a silence while the air clears. Political disagreement is rare in San Francisco in 2003: the areas of consensus are just so vast.

  “Do you write about this stuff for the paper?” Cynthia asks Maya, bringing the subject into a personal register and thus defusing it.

  Maya shifts gears easily. “No, I do local-government stuff,” she says. “Sometimes it feels a little irrelevant, especially these days.”

  Standing at the counter I force the scoop into the overfrozen ice cream. Sam mentions an acquaintance who writes a nightlife column for Maya’s paper, and they compare notes. Sam appears to treat the world as a set of interconnected play structures to which she has total access: gender, fashion, clubland. The recovery movement and its therapists and sweaters and self-help workbooks must seem passé to her. A historical shift has taken place while I wasn’t watching, and among young radical women the emphasis has shifted from personal oppression to self-definition. A few years ago, sexual abuse was the only thing on daytime TV. Now it’s anthrax attacks and shoe bombs and chemical weapons. So what happened to the sexual abuse? Maya’s talking now about her editor, her assignments, things I’ve heard before, and I imagine her as a helpless child, her father creeping down the hall to her room. I picture him as the Hooded Claw from the Perils of Penelope Pitstop cartoons. I have trouble envisioning the abusive act itself. Although of course it happens. And she’s never said he was actually inside her. Her memories aren’t clear. This line of thought is about to destroy everything. There are weapons, hidden out in the desert, or else there aren’t. The babies ripped from their incubators a decade ago in Kuwait, left on the cold floor to die, were a fabrication. These blurry sense-memories that vanish and then return, like lost sailors to their families’ doorsteps: him pressing up against her in the night, his hands on her body, his breath on her face. How sure can she be?

  8

  There are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

  —Donald Rumsfeld, February 12, 2002

  WHEN I WAS SEVEN, Nicky’s mom dropped me off at home and I knew that my parents had been waiting for me, although I’m not sure how I knew this. My mom said, “We’re getting what’s called a divorce.” I knew the word—it had happened to Dennis Yoder’s parents, and everyone was really quiet around him for a few weeks—but I wasn’t sure what it meant in practical terms. My father was teaching evening classes and often came home after I was asleep. I don’t know that I was sure who he was or why he lived with us.

  It was explained that Dad was going to move into an apartment in the neighborhood, and I was going to visit him there sometimes. I didn’t understand why I would be visiting him. Would it be like when we visited grown-ups who didn’t have any kids and there weren’t any toys there? I asked about that, and my dad said he’d get some toys. He sounded tired when he said it, and I thought that the toy store must be really far away from his apartment.

  And then my mom said, “This doesn’t mean we don’t love you anymore. You understand that, right?”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that what they were saying had anything to do with their love for me. They didn’t want to be married to each other, and having been around their marriage I didn’t blame them. But the idea that they didn’t love me anymore got stuck in my back teeth and I couldn’t get it out with my tongue.

  The most painful ideas are the hardest to dislodge.

  When we get home from Cynthia’s I pretend to be drunker than I am, gulping down a big glass of water, tossing my jacket onto the couch. I say I’m tired too many times, and then we go to bed and I lie awake for seven hours.

  Maya can wake herself at the time of her choice. At six minutes to seven she slips out of bed, fully alert, like someone moving from one scheduled activity to the next. As she dresses I lie still and imitate the even breaths of refreshing stage-four sleep. Her ablutions seem to take an inordinately long time. Finally the apartment door swings shut and I roll onto my back and look up at the ceiling and with no enthusiasm begin to masturbate. I used to masturbate with a dry hand, and then I discovered the advantage gained by lubricating your palm with saliva, and now I can’t remember how I used to do it without chafing. Perhaps I began with delicate little strokes, and for ten years I’ve been incrementally increasing the pressure in the interest of a more stimulating masturbatory experience, and now I flail at myself with vigorous pumps that would have frightened and overwhelmed me a decade ago. When this feeble attempt at self-soothing is finished I shower, make coffee, sit down on the couch, turn on the TV, and look back and forth between CNN and the gray view outside until at last I pick up the laptop from the coffee table.

  If you were to make a map of the web pages that turn up when you Google the term recovered memory, you’d see two clusters. One represents the recovery movement, which advocates for people who believe they’ve been abused. The other represents the false memory movement, which defends people who claim they’ve been wrongly accused. There are lots of connections within the clusters, but very few between them. Both sides have tragic stories to tell: traumatized children molested by trusted adults, innocent parents caught up in witch hunts. Some recovered memories have been corroborated; some have been disproved or recanted. Most of the websites are made by amateurs, and their clumsy designs make both sides seem crankish and untrustworthy.

  I’m left with this: Maya believes her father did terrible things to her. In the past few years she’s begun to remember him doing them. But what does remember mean? The images appear on her mental screen, or the feelings of terror and violation arise in her body, and they’re tagged as memories, as traces of things she once experienced. But how did they get tagged that way? The brain is complicated. There’s an experiment: You take two brothers. The older brother says, Hey, remember the time we were at the mall and you got lost? The younger brother says, Huh, I don’t remember that. And then the next day he says, Oh yeah, I kind of remember. And then the day after that he says, I was looking at the Transformers in the toy store and I turned around and everyone was gone. None of it ever happened.

  There is a temptation to discount stories of abuse merely because they’re horrible. It would be reassuring to turn every case of child abuse into a delusion, but they’re not all delusions. A college professor, on vacation with his wife, finds himself thinking about a former camp counselor, a man he last saw twenty-five years ago. For the first time, he remembers that this man sexually abused him. He investigates and finds three other campers who were abused by the same counselor. Camp employees recall finding the man in bed with a fifth boy. (This boy, now an adult, has no memory of the incident.) The counselor went on to abuse boys at a church in California, a school in Oregon, another in Texas.

  For a while, celebrities told their recovered memory stories on television every afternoon. Memoirs of abuse crowded the bestseller lists. And then sometime around 1998, it stopped. Was it a fad? Or did we bump up against a question we couldn’t answer and agree to change the subject?

  Is there a way to talk to her about it? Doesn’t it behoove you to strive for a realistic sense of what you do and don’t know about yourself? I should probably skip the part about what it behooves her to do. Isn’t it a kind of intellectual dishonesty not to acknowledge the ambiguity of the data? That’s even worse. Am I atop some high horse, proclaiming, I cannot love someone whose self-examination is insufficiently rigorous? Or is it that, to love something, you have to know what you’re loving—otherwise you’re not loving the thing itself, you’re loving some construct of your own?

  Of course I can’t say any of this to her. What if everything she believes is true? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Her mother dies and leaves her alone with her abusive father. She endures torture, grows up a stranger to herself. She struggles to k
now the truth, to put aside her defenses and live honestly in the face of the unbearable. And her lover demands proof? Accuses her of fabricating her memories? Monstrous.

  I keep imagining that I’m about to stumble on her father’s secret diary or her therapist’s case notes, whereupon the truth will come out. This will not happen. Nor will some profound and obviously authentic instinct well up in Maya and make itself available for consultation. Maya has no special access to the truth, and nor do I. The only person who does is Donald Marcom, and his word is the least credible of all.

  His gallery’s website displays only photographs of European bronzes and bas-reliefs. Subsequent search results include abstracts of articles in academic journals and deal reports in the trade press. What would happen if I were to ask him? Would I be able to tell, from something desperate and honest in his eyes, if he was lying?

  Maya’s investigation of the towing company will run in this week’s paper. She has uncovered a predictable but still newsworthy pattern of infractions: improper towing, overbilling, low-level graft. Today she called the company’s owner and presented him with the list of charges.

  “He just kept saying, It’s bullshit, it’s all bullshit, over and over,” she says. “I said, Can you be more specific? and he was like, Yeah, specifically, your story is bullshit, and then he hung up the phone.”

  I’m visiting her at the paper, which looks disappointingly like the office of any other midsized business. It’s past nine and the newsroom itself is deserted, but copy editors and layout artists huddle in peripheral warrens. Maya filed her story half an hour ago, and now we’re sitting at her cubicle eating takeout pasta from foil containers. Her editor is in his office with the sliding glass door shut, his feet on his desk, the printout in his hand, a ballpoint pen sticking out of his mouth. At any moment he may pull Maya away to clarify a sentence, resolve an inconsistency in the spelling of a name, draft an explanatory sidebar.

  “How are you going to feel tomorrow, when it comes out?” I ask.

  “A little edgy,” she says. “Not about the story—the story’s good. I’m just afraid he’s going to call and yell at me.” She tears a bread roll in half and swirls it around in my leftover vodka sauce.

  “So what if he does call you?” I say. “You can’t just hang up?”

  “I could,” she says. “The thing is, when people get upset they let stuff slip out. You’re meant to start taking notes, ask questions. One time I heard Angela on the phone with some guy who was yelling so loud I could hear his voice over the receiver. He goes, This is off the record, bitch, and starts laying into her. And she goes, Sorry, I’m not going to talk to you off the record. Anything you say I’m going to quote you. He just lit into her, out of control, and she was grinning like crazy while she was typing it up. I can’t do that. I get too freaked out when people yell at me. For obvious reasons.”

  At this last turn toward self-analysis she seems to switch modes, from casual chat to something more substantive. If her memories of abuse are correct, the moment calls for a swift, smooth expression of understanding and sympathy, nothing dramatic or intrusive. But what if they’re not correct? Does she then, on some level, perceive sympathy as gullibility, or does that presume some nonexistent stratum of accurate knowledge? As I wrestle with this problem I’m staring blankly at my empty pasta container, which surely seems callous whether her autobiographical narrative is genuine or fantastic. Acting like I believe her is probably the lower-risk strategy and the one to adopt in perpetuity. But in addition to possibly looking like a dupe I’d likely be niggled by doubt, which would be a drag on my performance and could on any occasion erupt into an incident of poor judgment. Maya is looking at me in a way that makes me worry about my facial expression. I have been silent for almost half a minute, which makes it too late to respond without justifying the caesura. I could change the subject, which would be a gross conversational foul but would move us to safer ground, if I could construct a coherent sentence on any topic other than the one I’m thinking about.

  “Are you OK?” she asks.

  “Fine!” I say. “Tired. Up late last night. Sorry. That’s too bad. About getting freaked out when people yell at you. That must be hard. Because of—it must be really hard.” She’s peering at me now with frank curiosity, as though I’m a species of animal she’s never seen before.

  A shout from the editor breaks the silence. “Get some rest,” Maya says, squeezing me on the arm.

  I walk home, past unfinished lofts stunted by the crash, and distract myself by thinking about Bill’s new project. I half wish he’d ask for my help, but if there’s no user-facing design I wouldn’t have much to contribute: multithreading is a notoriously difficult field in which I have no real experience.

  Inside my apartment I lie awake again, wondering whether Donald Marcom sleeps and what it means if he does. Then I give up. I am searching for flights to Los Angeles when I realize what I’m doing. I take my hands from the keyboard and press on my eyelids. This can solve nothing. Pedophilia isn’t visible on the skin like a rash. But the point is not to interrogate or diagnose him; the point is to fill in the empty space in Maya’s story. I have to address this, and I can’t address it alone, and I can’t raise it with her. And Donald Marcom, of Donald Marcom Fine Arts, 20977 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, is the only other person here.

  Transmuting the problem into the world of practicalities, of web searches and plane tickets and my credit card’s three-digit security code, brings on a surge of exhaustion. I barely reach my bed and manage to remain there for nine hours, gorging on unconsciousness, emerging every few hours and plunging back down again.

  When I’m finally awake things feel different. Sitting at the kitchen island drinking coffee it’s possible to believe that any problem can be solved by a man of action with adequate resources. I can get from my apartment to Donald Marcom’s gallery in an hour and a half. I will go to Los Angeles in two days, learn what can be learned, for whatever that’s worth. The sun streams in over Potrero Hill and turns the dust motes in the air into tiny stars.

  The gallery is in a glorified strip mall—a fancy white minicomplex with valet parking and a sushi restaurant and a dental practice—behind frosted windows on which DONALD MARCOM FINE ARTS has been stenciled in a discreet sans-serif face. This physical evidence of the man’s existence in the world is jarring. It would be easy to turn around, reclaim my rental car, drive straight back to the airport, call his secretary to tell her I’ve been waylaid. We spoke when I made the appointment yesterday: she had the voice of an older woman, hired for her skill and competence rather than her client appeal. I told her I was going to be in Los Angeles on short notice and was keen to see the collection. She started asking questions, being chatty; I actually thought, Wow, she’s friendly, before I realized she was trying to figure out whether I was worth her boss’s time. Invoking Silicon Valley freed up an hour in his schedule. I remember this successful bit of self-impersonation as I press the buzzer, then step back and wait for her to open the door, tall and canary-blond and professional, to admit me into the presence of the unknown.

  Instead, it’s him. It takes me a second to recognize him, because rather than the faceless villain of my imagination he is a specific human being in a herringbone suit. Maya didn’t inherit his coloring—his skin is ruddy and his hair, now gray, was probably once red—but she got his features, and this proof of their genetic connection stirs something queasy in me. Why is he so tall? Maya isn’t tall.

  “Thank you for coming down,” he says, stepping back to let me in. The gallery is a wide room crowded with densely wrought objects: bronzes and marbles and terra-cotta reliefs, busts and figures and little mythological scenes, each on a white podium or mounted on the walls. The ceiling is high and the blond wood floor and white walls are deliberately neutral, but there still seem to be too many sculptures; they compete with one another. “I’m so pleased that you’re interested in this stuff,” he says. “Why don’t you sit down. Can
I get you some water, or coffee?” His enunciation is nimble, almost British.

  At the far end of the gallery are two chairs, with a coffee table between them on which catalogues have been laid perfectly square with the corners. A bit farther are two desks, one grand and wooden, the other small and practical and made of glass. The larger one is covered with books and journals and legal pads, piled and spread-eagled, with Post-It flags marking pages. The other holds only a flat-panel iMac. Donald apparently leaves everything computer-related to his secretary. She said, “So we’ll see you tomorrow at two,” but she’s nowhere in evidence, and it is Donald himself who fetches the coffee. The chair is the kind that sinks your hips down below your knees and settles you into a semireclining posture that will require effort to climb out of. After some business with the coffee that takes place outside my field of vision, he sets it down and sits opposite me.

  “Why don’t you start by telling me how it is that you’re here and not in the studio of some San Francisco wunderkind,” he says. His pronunciation of wunderkind is unapologetically German. He crosses his legs and folds his hands on his knee. He reminds me of a psychoanalyst, someone who will listen to your dreams and point you toward what you really love.

  I am prepared for this. “I’ve read a bit about Renaissance Italy,” I tell him. “I recognize it. It was like the sixteenth-century version of Silicon Valley.” He smiles. “I don’t just mean all the money floating around, I mean the innovation, the new ideas.”

  “When they rediscovered the art of antiquity, a whole new world opened up,” he says.

  “It was like the solution to every problem they’d ever faced was lying there waiting for them to find it and put their name on it and make a ton of money,” I say. He seems to like this.