by Ben Lerner
“That’s insane.”
“Or maybe he dissected, I don’t know. Rachel told my dad that the funeral would be in Albany, where her father was from, and that she hoped he would go up with her the next day and he said sure and hung up the phone without ever telling her about his mom. Meanwhile, my dad’s own mom wasn’t being mourned properly at all. My grandfather was either in denial or involved with someone else, but either way, my dad and his younger siblings were being served frozen dinners and left to watch Gunsmoke or whatever and there was no service planned of any sort. So my dad just said that Rachel’s dad had died and he was going to Albany for the funeral and my grandfather said, without asking any questions: Fine. He took the train to Albany with Rachel, who wept the whole time—he never talked about his mom—and they eventually arrived at the family home, where the more Jewish side of the family was constantly praying and would be sitting shiva for seven days after the burial. It was a giant house and he was given a guest room and he sat up all night staring at the ceiling with occasional bouts of weeping from other parts of the house still audible late into the night as he tried to imagine where his mother’s body was, although I might be making that detail up.” I raised my hand to get the waitress’s attention from across the bar and then raised my empty glass.
“Guess what his job was the next day at the funeral? They gave him smelling salts and he was supposed to go around and revive any of the women who passed out or got weak from weeping. My dad, at twenty, secretly mourning his mother, walking around a funeral, which his mother would not have, dry-eyed and holding some kind of chemical compound under the noses of people whose ululations were causing them to swoon. I had heard this part of the story before, although it had never struck me so powerfully as it did that night as we drove home through the sleet for Daniel’s funeral, but then my dad started to tell me the part he’d never told me before.” My drink had arrived and I tried it; it was sweeter this time. Alex expressed the intensity of her attention by not touching her water. She had an ability to hold herself so still that it became a form of gracefulness.
After the funeral, when I left the family to sit shiva in that giant house in Albany, my dad told me, I had to take a train to Penn Station and then another train to D.C. I arrived at Penn Station without incident, although it was snowing heavily, but then in Penn Station there was some kind of problem with the train, no doubt due to the weather. I remember how cold I was: I was wearing my one suit, which I’d worn to the funeral, but my winter coat didn’t go with a suit, so I’d left it at home. There was an enormous line for the D.C. train—I’d never seen a line that long for any train at Penn Station—and it took forever for me to work my way to the platform. When I reached the platform, it was chaos: crowds, shouting. It turned out that two previous trains had been canceled due to ice on the tracks or something so there were all of these people desperate to get on this one, the last train out. They had even added extra cars—I could see them and they looked archaic, like decommissioned cars from the nineteenth century—to try to accommodate the overflow of passengers. I could picture all of this as we drove to Topeka, I said to Alex, with unusual vividness, maybe because the windows were fogged up and so little of the landscape was visible to distract me. And maybe I could picture it so vividly across from Alex because of the bar’s anachronistic décor. I imagined the clock at Penn Station as my dad tried to get home, probably inserting an image from Marclay’s video. But even so, my dad said to me, by the time I reached one of the car doors where there was both a man collecting tickets and a police officer trying to keep everybody calm, I was told that the train was full, that there were simply no more seats, that I’d have to stay the night in New York and catch the first morning train.
At first, my dad said to me, his eyes fixed on that part of the highway illuminated by his high beams, the sleet turning to snow in the headlights, I felt relieved. I didn’t want to go home to the house without my mother and face the bizarre denial of my dad and my confused younger brothers around whom I kept trying to act like everything that was happening was normal. But then I started getting—I remember this surprised me—really angry, and I said to the ticket collector with such intensity that he turned and looked at me, as did a couple of the other people around us: I am getting on this train. I think I sounded like a lunatic. I’m afraid that’s not possible, son, the ticket collector said after looking me over, my dad said to me, I said to Alex, and maybe it was the fact that he said it kindly, and that he said “son,” but the next thing I knew, I burst into tears there on the platform. I mean, I really lost it, tears and snot and everything, standing there freezing in my suit, maybe still with smelling salts in my breast pocket, all the repressed emotion, all the emotion I’d been planning to share with Rachel when I’d called her the day our parents died and held in during her father’s funeral, all of it started to surface. And then I said to the conductor: Please, I said, please: my mother is dying. I have to get back. I have to get back in time, please, I kept repeating. My mother is dying. And I felt as if it were true: as if she were dying and not dead, or as if the train could take me back in time.
I drank my drink and Alex drank her water in silence for a minute and I placed my hand on the table so it was touching hers in order to communicate that I was also thinking about her mom. Then my dad was quiet in the car, nothing but the sound of the windshield wipers, as if that were the end of the story, so finally I said: And then? And then, he said, as if it were an afterthought, they let me on the train, one of the decommissioned cars, and an older woman who had overheard my outburst on the platform ended up sitting beside me. And I remember she bought me tea and cookies from the food car and I slept a big part of the ride back on her shoulder. I remember her saying every once in a while: Your mom is going to be just fine.
I finished my drink, accidentally swallowing some mint. “We were going the wrong direction, by the way.”
“What?”
“My dad drove us an hour into Missouri; he was so caught up in the story, he missed the exit for Topeka.”
“Maybe he was driving toward D.C.”
Then, voluble from the alcohol, I told her about Noor and Mrs. Meacham and she told me a story about her mother she made me swear I’d never include in anything, no matter how disguised, no matter how thoroughly I failed to describe faces or changed names.
* * *
A circuitous path leading through several museum buildings allows the visitor to trace the evolution of vertebrates, a walkable cladogram with alcoves on either side of the path displaying fossils of species that shared physical characteristics—e.g., “four limbs with movable joints surrounded by muscle” (tetrapods). I’d paid almost fifty dollars for two tickets to the American Museum of Natural History so that Roberto and I could tour the osseous remains, could track the evolution of new traits, a field trip I’d been promising him for many months and had finally proposed to his mother when I handed him off one afternoon after tutoring; she either forgot about my offer or considered it for several weeks before letting me know through Aaron which Saturdays—Sundays were taken up with church and family—were workable. I’d called her to finalize arrangements: I would meet her and Roberto at the subway stop nearest their apartment, the D on Thirty-sixth in Sunset Park, and he and I would travel together, transferring to the C at West Fourth, to the Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side. We’d spend several hours at the museum, assuming his attention held, then I’d take him out to lunch, mindful of his allergies, and return him to the family home in the late afternoon. Roberto’s older sister, Jasmine, was initially planning to join us—primarily, I assumed, to make Anita feel more comfortable—but, Anita explained to me when we exchanged holas at the Thirty-sixth Street stop, Jasmine had had to work an unexpected shift at the Applebee’s in Flatbush. Anita seemed a little nervous as she transferred Roberto, tremulous with excitement, to my care.
It was not until we were standing on the platform and Roberto approached its edge
to point out two soot-colored rats moving among the garbage on the tracks that I consciously registered the fact that I had never been so responsible for another person, at least not a young person. I’d babysat my nephews when visiting Seattle, but always in their home, never abroad in a crumbling metropolis; I’d carried a passed-out Alex back to her dorm from a party after we’d split a horse tranquilizer in college; I’d taken Jon to the emergency room three times for injuries he’d sustained through drunken athletic idiocy or defending his or Sharon’s honor in brief and clumsy fights, etc.; but none of my peers was a flight risk or a possible kidnapping victim. With a sinking feeling I realized that, if I were Anita, I might well have declined to entrust my child to my care. But then, Aaron had vouched for me: I was a published author.
I told Roberto to step back from the platform as the train approached and as soon as we sat down I showed him the notebooks I’d brought for jotting down our observations—the notebooks had been Alex’s suggestion—and explained our goals for the day in a tone that implied we were embarking on a solemn paleontological mission that would admit of no spontaneity, let alone insubordination. Roberto was particularly excited to see the display of an allosaurus skeleton positioned over an apatosaurus’s corpse as though it were scavenging and he kept leaping up from the seat to mimic the bipedal predator’s posture—he’d seen it on the Internet—and I kept telling him to sit down.
At West Fourth we caught the C and it was crowded. At Fourteenth a crush of new passengers entered the train and bodies imposed themselves between Roberto and me. I wondered if people would have stepped between us if we were racially indistinguishable; I pushed my way back to him and took his hand. This was the first time our bodies had come into willed contact in the many months of our relationship and he looked up at me, maybe with curiosity, maybe reacting to the sweatiness of my palm; we are going to stick together at all times, I said to him, noting the desperation in my own voice. To dispel it I smiled and complimented his red Jurassic Park T-shirt and asked him to remind me what giant sauropods most likely ate. While he enumerated prehistoric flora, I was thinking: holding his hand is the only permissible physical contact; if he were to run away from me, I couldn’t grab or otherwise discipline him; if he reported any form of restraint beyond hand-holding during transit, who knows what would happen; an undocumented family wasn’t going to call the cops, but his dad might run me over in the truck Roberto was always bragging about; they might report Aaron, who had let me enter the school without observing protocol. “You’re not my teacher,” Roberto had said on more than one occasion when I’d tried to force him to focus on our book; I imagined him exclaiming it in the museum and then disappearing into the depths of the bioluminescence exhibit, never to be seen again.
By the time we reached the Eighty-first Street entrance, I was debating two strategies: either establish a draconian presence at the outset of our visit that would deter all forms of noncompliance, promising to cut short the trip at the first infraction—that there would be trouble I now considered inevitable, although it had never worried me before—and threatening to call his mom, whose cell phone number I had, maybe even evoking Joseph Kony, but then, at the end of the visit, buying him whatever he desired from the gift shop, my largesse making me appear to him retrospectively benevolent; or I’d just skip the disciplinarian stuff and bribe him at every opportunity until the time I returned him, loaded with presents and full of artificial dyes, to his family, who now seemed a country away. As Roberto and I stood in line for tickets in the packed lobby, I devoted some small portion of my brain to chatting with the boy about museum highlights, some portion to objecting to the admission price, but most of my consciousness was working its way toward the horrible realization that I simply was not competent to take a prepubescent on an educational day trip. I could feel the urea and salts emerging from my underarms as I longed for Jasmine, whom I’d never met, or for Alex, whom all kids seemed instinctively eager to obey.
We bought our tickets and walked quickly through the Space and Earth displays, past the giant Ecosphere, which interested the child not at all—“No running, Roberto”—until we reached the steps and ascended to the fourth floor, where a guard directed us to the Orientation Center, starting point of the evolutionary path. How did this happen, I wondered, still catching my breath from the stairs, how is it that a thirty-three-year-old man who appears to meet most societal norms of functionality—employed (however lightly), sexually active (however irresponsibly), socially embedded (if unmarried and childless)—is in the grip of a fear so intense as to overwhelm reason as a result of taking a sweet kid to a museum? But as we began our journey along the circuitous path and through the Hall of Vertebrate Origins, Roberto pulling me by the arm as quickly as possible through the cases of jawless fish and placoderms toward the Hall of Ornithischian Dinosaurs, I had to question any account of myself as normative, mature. Thus began my second-order panic: not only was I horrified of something going wrong with Roberto, but I was horrified of being horrified, as it indicated my manifold inadequacy. I recalled the initial consultation with the fertility specialist when she’d asked about our mental health histories: while I’d had three protracted bouts of serious depression and plenty of anxiety, and while I’d had a long-term if intermittent relationship with SSRIs and benzodiazepines, there was no major mental illness in my family, and I thought of myself more as darkly ruminative and inclined to complain than as sufficiently disturbed to have implications for reproduction or parenting; Alex, who knew me as well as anyone, had obviously agreed. But now, as I heard myself command Roberto to write down every evolutionary advance the museum placards noted (“development of braincase”; “the palatal opening”; etc.), a highlight reel of my lower moments played before me.
I remembered the pavor nocturnus of my eighth year, my baffled brother trying to comfort me by offering his semiprecious baseball cards, although I was, with the exception of one frightening summer, a happy enough child. The more serious trouble started, as it often does, in college: tremors and numbness in my hands, the feeling that they belonged to someone else or were autonomous; the sense that if I did not will every breath, did not breathe manually, I would cease to breathe entirely; there among the primitive vertebrates, I experienced the echo of each symptom I recalled. Then there was splashing water on a face with which I failed to identify in the dorm, its blown pupils, or slowly coming to realize during an evening seminar on Thomas Hobbes that the irruption of hysterical laughter was my own; there was the episode of sleep paralysis and an attendant incubus hallucination so severe that I couldn’t shut my eyes without Alex’s company for several days (“Write ‘antorbital opening,’” I instructed Roberto; “write ‘three-fingered hand’”); I remembered weeping, although it never happened, as quietly as possible in a bathroom stall at a fancy restaurant in Madrid, my blood a patchwork of sertraline, tetrahydrocannabinol, clonazepam, and Rioja. All these lacrimal events and bouts of depersonalization were no doubt leading, I was then convinced, to the onset of schizophrenia. Indeed, the irony of my recent cardiac diagnosis was that it gave me an objective reason for my emotional turbulences and so was, in that sense, stabilizing: now I was reckoning with a specific existential threat, not just the vacuum of existence. But as a dozen proprioceptive breakdowns flashed before me in the museum, there was a reversal of figure and ground: I wasn’t a balanced person who had his difficult periods; I was an erratic blind to his own psychological precariousness; I was no more a functional adult than Pluto was a planet.
We stopped before a display explaining the development of the vertebrate jaw and, as I instructed Roberto to sketch the remains of a pterosaur in his notebook, I felt despair spread through me like contrast dye. The eight-year-old is having a fine time learning about evolution while his guide is freaking out because of all the strangers and stimulation; I was the nervous kid far from home longing for my parents, not Roberto; I was the one who kept clinging to his hand; I’d become the unreliable narrator
of my first novel. Roberto tried to bolt with excitement toward the next alcove and I instinctually grabbed his arm to stop him, jerking it a little. “Ow,” he said, not hurt, but understandably disconcerted. I said I was sorry and knelt down and looked him in the eye and explained to him in Spanish, no doubt visibly pale and perspiring, that we must avoid getting separated. Then I told him, probably sounding as if I were giving orders for a suicide mission, that if we somehow did lose each other, we should meet at the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton. He smiled, but didn’t say anything; I wondered if he was embarrassed for me.
We entered the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs—a room containing some of the museum’s most impressive fossil displays—and found the apatosaurus skeleton, recently remounted to reflect new research, a placard explained, about how the dinosaur was likely to have carried itself; the tail was now aloft, no longer dragging on the ground. There was a large group of Asian children, Korean I guessed, standing around the skeleton in matching blue T-shirts, listening to their guide; Roberto couldn’t get as close as he wanted to the bones. By the time I finished asking him to sketch the tail, he had rushed off with excitement toward the allosaurus depicted feeding on a carcass. I followed him with enforced calm, stood beside him and uttered some vaguely educational instruction, and then he ran to the next arrangement of mineralized tissues and I followed. This was how we proceeded through the hall, Roberto occasionally reversing the evolutionary course by sprinting back to see a highlight—I at least had the presence of mind to take his picture on my cell phone before the giant Tyrannosaurus rex, mounted as if stalking prey—and then running back to the future to admire, say, some protoceratops skulls arranged in a growth series. As long as I keep him within sight, I told myself, everything will be fine; it’s not as though there are kidnappers lurking among the relatives of extinct mammals; most crazy people can’t afford the exorbitant admission price.