Still, she was his professor, not his therapist. She said that trying to be entertaining while teaching math must be frustrating. After that, she simply listened. Which, she suspected, his fellow mathematicians rarely did.
What he said was that he had grown up in an immigrant neighborhood in west Chicago. His parents had sacrificed everything to escape Communist Poland. His mother had been a homemaker. His father worked at a sausage factory. But they were the only residents on their block who weren’t mired in the backward views of the Catholic Church. They spoke grammatically correct English—Thaddy’s own accent betrayed only the high-pitched vowels of the winds blowing off the lake in his native city. They didn’t oppose integration in the schools; they welcomed it. They took Thaddy and his younger brother to museums, ball games, concerts. When Thaddy demonstrated a precocious ability in mathematics, they insisted he be skipped not one grade, but two.
“I felt like a freak,” Thaddy said. “I felt like a smart little mouse that got sent into a cage every day for the cats to play with.”
She couldn’t recall which details Thaddy told her that first afternoon and which he revealed on his later visits. But she knew he had been hectored by his parents not only to earn high grades but to prove himself socially popular. A real American teenage boy. To please his parents, Thaddy joined the Boy Scouts. But he hated the uniforms and thought the adult leaders creepy and dumb. He signed up for the chess club and the math club. He took up trombone and joined the band. But there wasn’t a single girl in either club, and he felt too shy to approach his female bandmates. His father was a distant, demanding man—not the sort of father who might give advice on what to say to a girl. Besides, when would Thaddy have found the time to hang around with normal kids? How, when his parents pushed him so hard to make them proud of their little genius?
The only time he hadn’t been bullied was when he was adopted as a mascot by the older boys in his chemistry class. They allowed him to pal around because he did their homework. But he hated those guys. Once, they doused a cat with alcohol, then set the poor animal on fire. They tried the same experiment on a drunk they found passed out in the baseball dugout behind the school. Panicked, Thaddy ran off. He didn’t think the man died. But he vowed he would never hang out with those boys again, no matter how often his parents asked why he was sitting alone on a Friday night rather than going out with the nice new friends he had made at school.
Finally, the boys pressured Thaddy into using his knowledge to set off an explosion in their chemistry class. “I didn’t want to,” Thaddy said. “But they were bigger and older. How could I tell them no?” They wanted Thaddy to destroy enough equipment so they wouldn’t have to do any more experiments that year. But he engineered a bomb that would just make a loud noise and a lot of smoke. The teacher figured out who was to blame. What other student was smart enough to build a bomb? Thaddy knew better than to rat out his classmates, so he was the only student to be suspended.
“Too bad the suspension didn’t go on my record,” Thaddy said. His high school had never gotten a student into a really good college, so the principal made sure the incident didn’t ruin Thaddy’s chances to be admitted to Harvard. “I wish I had been thrown in jail,” Thaddy told Maxine. “I wish, instead of going to Harvard, I went to the community college down the block.”
At sixteen, Thaddy had been the youngest in his freshman class. Also, the only student whose father worked at a sausage-making factory. He was treated even more cruelly by the preppies at Harvard than he had been by the jocks in high school. (Maxine flinched: Sam had been a preppy at Harvard, too.) The girls were two years older and far more polished. Thaddy hoped the anti-intellectualism he suffered in high school would be replaced by a dedication to the life of the mind. But the students in Cambridge seemed even more superficial and dedicated to getting drunk.
Sophomore year, Thaddy signed up for a class in behavioral psychology. The professor talked about how neurobiologists would soon be able to hook electrodes to your head and shape your memories. Such knowledge might be used to cure tendencies toward violence or pedophilia. But Thaddy was afraid the government would use these new techniques to make people like him conform to some placid, easy-to-manipulate standard of behavior. How would Big Business resist brainwashing the population into buying whatever useless crap they might be selling?
The professor asked if anyone wanted to participate in an experiment. Thaddy, who was desperately poor, signed up. Not only did he need the cash, he wanted to prove his professor’s theories wrong.
Instead, what happened was that the professor’s team of graduate students locked Thaddy in a room and forced him to answer question after question designed to elicit his reaction to every possible social situation. Over the following year, they used a series of punishments and rewards to reprogram his responses. When Maxine pressed him for an example, Thaddy said, “I can’t. It was too humiliating. I felt like a puppy who took a shit on the floor and got his nose rubbed in his own excrement.” What was worse, the system worked. After two semesters of being subjected to their experiments, Thaddy found himself responding in ways the graduate students trained him to respond.
Maxine had no way of verifying what Thaddy said. But neither did she disbelieve him. He might have been an angry, eccentric young man. But he didn’t seem delusional. He would have dropped out of society a long time ago, he told her. But even a bare-bones existence required enough money to purchase a few isolated acres, build a cabin, and buy whatever necessities he couldn’t grow or make himself. That was why he was studying for his PhD. He hoped to find a job that would allow him to save enough money so he could give up his position and live for himself rather than to please his parents or feed the maw of the corporate-military-industrial complex.
In the meantime, he said, his life wasn’t so terrible. The other mathematicians were as nerdy as he was. No one taunted him. What drove him crazy was that even the other nerds succeeded in attracting girlfriends. The one time he persuaded a young Korean statistics major to join him for coffee, the afternoon ended in disaster. When Thaddy walked her to her bus, he tried to kiss her. She pushed him off and told him even though he was a “nice boy” and “highly intelligent,” she was interested in no more than friendship. Upset, he tried to board the bus so he could apologize. But he didn’t have his wallet or student ID, so he needed to race back to his room, find the card, and take a later bus. Getting off at the development where the woman lived, he wandered around asking if anyone knew the smart Korean mathematician with the long black hair. When he happened to run into her, she got very upset and told him he was “stalking” her. Later, she complained to his adviser she was “uncomfortable” having an office on the same hall as Thaddy, and he was moved to a different floor.
“What did she think I was going to do, corner her in her office and attack her?” Sure, he hoped she might kiss him back. But if she didn’t, he at least wanted to know someone might care for him, as a friend.
Maxine took this as a hint. The more he stopped by to talk, the more she came to think he saw her as the mother he wished he’d had. A mother who didn’t care about his grades. Who didn’t criticize him for his tendency to stammer and slouch and crack his knuckles. So many young men were desperate to escape their mothers, Maxine thought. But they were desperate to be loved and approved of by those same mothers. They ran away as soon as they were old enough to escape. But they craved a woman’s touch. They tried to attract a girlfriend. If they couldn’t, their rage at all women—mothers, girlfriends, bosses—amplified to ominous proportions.
So yes, she had wanted to be Thaddy’s mother. Or, like most teachers, she had given in to the temptation to save a student no one else seemed willing or able to save.
To delay reading Thaddy’s long final paper, she refreshes her memory of Conrad’s novel. She has reread it every semester she has taught the course. But never with an eye toward determining wh
ether it might have inspired a terrorist to send explosives to a dozen victims. She reads again about Mr. Verloc, who pretends to be an anarchist while serving as the agent of a foreign power. Called in by his handler, Verloc is ordered to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, which might cause the British government to crack down on his fellow anarchists. If a terrorist blows up a church, the public might see the perpetrator as hating religion. If he blows up a palace, the terrorist might be expressing his resentment of the rich. If he assassinates an official, he might be protesting a specific party. But to strike at science itself? Whoever aims a bomb at science must be determined to sweep away the most rational basis of society.
As Maxine recalls, Thaddy also had been attracted to a character named Karl Yundt, who ranted about the need for a band of men to free themselves of compassion and enlist death in the service of all humanity. The students in Maxine’s class debated whether such a band of revolutionaries might be justified in destroying fossil-fuel plants if this meant preventing millions of human deaths and animal extinctions from global warming. Thaddy supported one side of the argument. The rest of Maxine’s class argued for the other.
“How can you not see I’m right?” Thaddy had demanded. “How can you not justify a few deaths now to ward off a massive disaster later?”
Thaddy had grown so vehement Maxine prohibited him from mentioning Yundt’s band of destroyers or writing about them further. In response, Thaddy shifted the topic of his fascination—and his long final paper—to Conrad’s creepiest creation, “the Professor.” Unattractive, lacking in social graces, the Professor had turned his intellectual gifts toward designing the perfect detonator for a bomb. To avoid capture, he rigged up a device such that, if he were threatened with arrest, he could press a rubber bulb in his pocket and blow himself up, along with anyone in his vicinity. Shabby and insignificant, the Professor nonetheless exerted a fearsome power stemming from his disdain for conventional morality and his willingness to blow himself up to attain his aims.
Maxine remembers being shocked by Thaddy’s admiration for such a character. At the time, she told herself he was only playing the devil’s advocate. But Thaddy maintained that Conrad, whether intentionally or against his will, had created a man who embodied an unassailable position. If technology was destroying the planet, then violence in the service of destroying that technology must be acceptable. After all, if a despot like Hitler threatened to destroy millions of innocent citizens, wouldn’t assassination prove the moral course? Any compassion a revolutionary might feel toward his victim needed to be replaced by logically based ideals.
Maxine disagreed. Violence was rarely, if ever, justified. The Professor had invented his ideology as an excuse to take revenge on a society that scorned him because he was ugly and short. Surely there was someone Thaddy loved? Someone whose suffering evoked compassion he couldn’t dismiss as the result of childhood brainwashing?
No. He felt nothing toward anyone.
Not even his parents?
Thaddy had shaken his head. Then his expression softened. “My brother. He promised he would run away with me. There was this nice piece of land I found. We were going to give up the stupid, soul-killing lives we managed to get stuck in. Build a cabin. Live on the land.”
Maxine asked Thaddy what had happened. Why hadn’t he and his brother run away?
His expression turned to scorn. “He met some woman. She convinced him to go back for a degree in social work. Social work! Now he’s just another henpecked husband, rattling on about the ratio of phosphorus and nitrogen in the fertilizer on his lawn and how he’s never going to afford his kids’ tuition. His wife won’t let him go on a camping trip, let alone drop off the grid and live with me.”
Again, it seemed Thaddy hated his brother less because the younger man had sold out than because he had managed to attract a wife. Like the Professor, Thaddy manufactured an ideology that would justify his revenge on a world that didn’t recognize his superiority. A world that left him lonely and in so much pain.
Finally, she feels ready to read Thaddy’s paper. After she finishes, she returns to the manifesto. Then back to Thaddy’s paper. By midnight, she can’t remember where she has read which phrases. “Can’t be eating your cake and having it too.” “Rule of thumbs.” “One felt swoop.” “Out of the sky blue clear.” She expects Thaddy to step through the door and laugh in that creaky, startled way. Good for you. You’re cleverer than I gave you credit for. I was wondering how long you would need to figure this out.
But he is never coming back. She did something to humiliate him. Or he felt humiliated by something he confessed to. Something he was embarrassed to have her know. It happened in mid-December, the days so short that when Thaddy showed up at her office, Maxine was already dreading the walk home in the windy dark. Even paler than usual, Thaddy stepped inside and shut the door.
He couldn’t stand it, he said. It did weird things to a person, being so alone. Never being touched. It made you physically sick. The graduate students who shared the room on the other side of his wall kept having sex. He could hear them. Moaning. Calling each other’s names. He couldn’t take it anymore. If he didn’t feel a woman’s arms around him, soon, he was going to kill himself.
So he had made an appointment with a psychiatrist. He was going to lie and tell the doctor he wanted to change his sex. You could do that these days, he told Maxine. You could lie and say you were a woman who had been born inside a man’s body, and if you convinced the doctors you were unhappy enough, they would give you a bunch of hormones and perform some operation, and, eventually, you became a woman. Then he could be held in a woman’s arms. His own arms. But those arms would be a woman’s. He no longer would be a man, so maybe he would feel less pain. Maybe, as a woman, he wouldn’t feel the same torture. Maybe he would be more attractive. Maybe he would be desired by a man. Or by another woman. He could pretend to be a lesbian. Then again, he wouldn’t be pretending. He would be a woman who wanted to be made love to by another woman.
He told Maxine he had waited in the psychiatrist’s office for an hour. But when the receptionist called his name, he apologized and ran out. Afraid of what he might do in his apartment, listening to his housemates make love, he had hurried to find Maxine, hoping she would be there.
She wasn’t sure what to say. Even then she knew Thaddy wasn’t really a transsexual. He wasn’t a woman trapped inside a man’s body. He was going to lie and pretend to be one so he could fool the doctors into transforming him into a woman. How could anyone be so starved for a woman’s touch he would think of changing his gender—taking hormones, allowing himself to be medically castrated—so he could feel a woman’s arms around him? His own arms. She pictured Thaddy in his room. The same square-jawed, masculine face. But with long hair and a woman’s breasts. Crossing his now-feminine arms across his chest. That afternoon, in her office, he had been wearing his usual button-down shirt and khakis trousers, his skin whiter and smoother than actual flesh. The sweat stood out on his forehead like water on a plastic shower curtain.
“Oh, Thaddy,” she had said. “A woman—a real, actual woman—will fall in love with you. You just need to be patient. You have so much to offer.”
“Yeah?” he said. “Like what.”
“Well,” she said, “you clearly are going to be very successful in your field. A lot of women will find that compelling. And—I don’t mean to be inappropriate—you’re a very good-looking man. Someday, you will meet a woman …” She didn’t know how to put it. A woman who would be as awkward and inexperienced as he was? A woman who would love to be loved as much as Thaddy? “A woman who will appreciate you for who you are.”
“Right. Just like I had girls falling all over me because I was the star of the math club in high school. I am smart. And I do care. But none of that matters. No woman could ever love me. No one!”
He was hunched over, crying in his hands
. He was only ten or twelve years older than her son. Her arms physically ached to hold him.
But professors weren’t supposed to hug their students. Especially not graduate students as good-looking as Thaddy. She told herself she would be hugging him not as his professor but as his mother. But she wasn’t Thaddy’s mother. She had always sensed some degree of sexual tension between them. He had been, what, twenty-three to her forty-four. But back then, she could have passed for her early thirties. What if Thaddy took her embrace the wrong way? Every rule in the book forbade physical contact between a student and a professor. Especially in an office with the door shut and the blinds drawn. After a conversation so heavily freighted with sexual content.
She had sat there so long he grew embarrassed. She wanted to suggest he check himself into the hospital. But she couldn’t bear to think of him confined to a locked ward with a bunch of psychotic inmates. Instead, she urged him to make an appointment at student services. How could she have been so stupid? Thaddy would never have consented to being counseled by a female social worker barely older than he was.
He mumbled that he wasn’t serious. Fooling the doctors into making him a woman was only a passing idea that scared him. He never would have gone through with such a crazy plan.
He left. He didn’t show up for their final seminar. He handed in his portfolio by slipping it beneath her door. She sent him emails begging him to stop by to talk. Clearly, he had been mortified that his professor had seen him at his weakest. Or maybe he was angry she had failed to provide what any decent human being would have given him. Maybe, if she had taken Thaddy in her arms, she would have prevented his later violence. Unless that was only another form of her messiah complex.
The Professor of Immortality Page 10