Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  If he had control of himself, Jesse Vogel, then nothing else mattered in the universe.

  He walked quickly—the panic was feeding energy into his legs. He could hear faint noises from the fraternity houses on the other side of the campus, up along Washtenaw, and he knew that what had seemed so deeply and ominously silent to him was not silence at all but was filled with the special small language of human beings. But he could not understand this language. Even Anne-Marie’s words, her love, her perfumy essence—he could not understand it. So he walked fast, heading home, hurrying home on a pleasant cloudy night in April. What would await him at the rooming house? It was a kind of home for him; yes, he was fond of it, dependent upon it—the other tenants laughed at him because he was so easily victimized by the landlady, who was without a husband, perhaps divorced? widowed? abandoned? and who got Jesse to leave his books and run errands for her, beat carpets in the back yard as they hung, enormously heavy, from a straining clothesline, or watch over her eight-year-old daughter, a sorrowful child with glasses. But he liked living there. It was filled with the noise of other students, with their yelping laughter and radios and heavy footsteps, with the landlady’s scolding of her daughter, but he liked it—it helped to dispel his own thoughts, his memories, the problems of his being. Control. That was all he wanted. The noises other people made helped to dispel Jesse’s private burdens a little. He did not want to complain, even to himself, and so he blocked off the channels that led back to certain thoughts, just as he had recklessly and desperately sold that car of his, at a great loss, just to be rid of it, rid of it permanently, years ago here in Ann Arbor.… But at times, when his panic threatened, he had the idea that his private memories fed somehow into a vast universal memory, a sorrow not his own that he had not lived through and therefore could not erase, even by the most intense rituals of thought—this confused sorrow that populated the universe, that constructed the universe. It was not local. It was not even contained in the vast wastes of the war or in the jumble of history in this century. Time was mobbed with people. How could he establish himself, construct himself, in such a mob …? It was harmonious, unlocalized, spread out evenly everywhere. There was nothing human to it.

  He wanted to argue with that professor. He wanted to insist that these things did not matter.… No, he wanted to embrace Anne-Marie violently, sweetly, he wanted to whisper these things to her, he wanted to frighten her with their terror and then calm her, soothe her, bring her back to the cheerful busyness of her usual life. But he knew that she would not understand. He had no right to force her to understand. If he loved her he would guard her from such thoughts; if he loved her he would not really bring her into himself, into his consciousness, but would allow her to remain herself.… He had learned from the few novels he had read in his lifetime that love demanded rescue. He must rescue his beloved from danger, even the danger of himself. The story demanded that a male rescue a female from danger and he would be punished if he failed.…

  Glancing back over his shoulder, Jesse saw someone following him half a block away. This person—a man—looked familiar, but Jesse did not have time to see who it was before he turned back again uneasily. This street led past residence halls and was therefore noisy. Jesse glanced at the rows of lighted dormitory windows and felt a pang of jealousy for the simplicity of these undergraduates’ lives—when he had worked in dining halls he’d envied the boys’ sloppiness, their loud herding instincts. He felt an impulse to go into one of the halls, just to avoid the man behind him. It was probably a classmate of his, wanting help. Wanting to borrow notes. At least everyone knew enough not to ask to borrow money from him. He owed the university more money than ever, almost three thousand dollars.… Jesse turned up one of the walks and went into a residence hall, walking quickly, as if he lived here, and once inside he paused to wait a few minutes. It was crowded here. Jesse had always felt oddly benevolent toward the undergraduates at the university, though they had money and he was poor; he thought of them as children, they were so boisterous and sure of themselves. They lived in rooms jammed with junk, dirty clothes and towels flung everywhere, sheets that went unchanged for weeks, they played poker and drank happily and stupidly; they were children and could be blamed for nothing. Those who did not live in the residence halls lived in palatial fraternity houses—enormous houses where music blared and curtains were blown outside windows. Jesse thought of these young people as jammed together warmly, perpetually. They came alive in crowds. Their faces brightened in herds. He envied them but felt, in a way, protective of them: when he was a doctor he would be serving them.

  After a few minutes he took a side door out to the street again and hurried the few blocks to his rooming house. Now no one was following him.

  He went up to his room on the third floor and saw that the door was ajar—he had evidently left it open in his hurry to leave that morning—and then, in the doorway, he was shocked to see that someone was in the room, sitting at his “desk,” the cluttered table he worked at. It was Dr. Monk, “Monk,” the man who assisted Dr. Cady in the neuro-chemistry course. Jesse realized now that Monk had been following him.

  “Hello!” Monk said with a big smile.

  He got to his feet and extended his hand. For a moment Jesse stood in the doorway, too stunned to react. Then, feebly, he shook hands with Monk. He could not help glancing around the room, as if checking it.

  “I took the liberty of making myself at home. I didn’t think you’d mind. You don’t mind?” Monk said. He had caught Jesse’s instinctive checking of the room and this seemed to amuse him. “I swear I haven’t taken a thing! I haven’t been tempted even by that stale sweet roll on the radiator, I swear.… Are you comfortable here? You’re fairly isolated, at least, on the third floor.”

  “Yes.…” Jesse said vaguely, not catching all this.

  “You’re wondering how I knew where you live?” Monk said.

  Jesse was too confused to reply.

  “I knew that you certainly didn’t live in that residence hall,” Monk said with a grin. “Well, why don’t you come in? Sit down? You’ll make me think I’m not welcome.”

  Jesse knew Monk slightly. He was an instructor in the medical school, having taken a degree somewhere else—Minnesota, Jesse believed. Monk had interned and taken a year’s residency at Michigan. He was supposed to be brilliant. He attended all of Dr. Cady’s lectures, sitting up at the front of the room in the left-hand corner, facing both Cady and the class, leaning forward attentively, earnestly; he corrected examinations for Cady and ran a laboratory section. Jesse had had a few hurried conversations with him about something Cady had touched upon, and once he had met Monk in a building late in the afternoon, in that dreary yellowish late afternoon of university buildings that is like a condition of the soul—but he had never had time to accept Monk’s invitations to have coffee together or to go out drinking. Now he felt awkward, apologetic, as if this cramped room were Monk’s and he himself an intruder.

  “Yes, it isn’t bad up here,” Monk said. “I wondered where you lived. You look so incredibly serious all the time, it’s difficult to think of you living anywhere, actually sleeping, becoming unconscious occasionally.… Are all these books yours? Jesus. Are those more books over there? You truly are a serious student, aren’t you? My friend Bob Winslow lives on the first floor here. He says the landlady is a little crazy and that she takes advantage of you. Is that true?”

  “No,” Jesse said.

  Monk laughed.

  Jesse smiled a small, patient smile. What did this man want? Why didn’t he leave? But Monk did not quite meet his gaze—he was a big man, looking a few years older than his age because of his slack, thinning blond hair, which was uncombed, and the pouches beneath his eyes. He was about thirty. He had an abrupt nervous laugh, a generous, good-natured manner, tufts of eyebrows that rose continually in mock surprise, a voice that was too loud for intimate conversation. He was too loud, too large. The few times Jesse had spoken with Monk
he had felt uneasy, uncomfortable, as if he were holding a book up too close to his eyes. That way you couldn’t read: the print was just a threat.

  “I saw you leave the lab tonight and wanted to say hello. It’s about time we got to know each other; you’ll be leaving in a few months, won’t you? Where are you going?”

  “Chicago, I hope.”

  “Where, LaSalle?”

  “Yes.”

  “How are things going with you?”

  “All right,” Jesse said.

  Jesse sat on the edge of his bed. Monk was sitting in Jesse’s chair. He crossed his legs uneasily, as if he sensed Jesse’s irritation. Then he smiled, ready to begin a new topic, approaching Jesse from another angle. He spoke buoyantly of the work he was doing—neurophysiological experiments for Cady, on a big research grant—endless cuttings of cats. “To be factual and therefore more pedantic and confusing,” he said, “we’re working with a monosynaptic reflex pathway of the cat spinal cord, a fascinating mechanism!”

  “What are you doing?” Jesse asked.

  “Oh—” Monk said, waving the question away, “oh, I think it will turn out to be for Cady’s private fortune; maybe he wants to perfect another barbiturate and patent it … you know he’s already wealthy from a patent he has? No, didn’t you know that? I thought everyone knew.”

  “I don’t know much about Cady.”

  “You admire him, though. Enormously.”

  “I suppose so,” Jesse said.

  “It shows in your face, even at nine in the morning. Obvious adulation. It’s good to see that kind of thing, even at nine in the morning.”

  Jesse was silent.

  “Well, yes, Cady is an extraordinary man and there aren’t many like him. I don’t blame you for admiring him. We all do.” Monk’s enthusiasm did not seem sincere to Jesse. It was a way of talking, a method, while his eyes prowled restlessly around the room and back and forth over Jesse’s face. His face seemed larger than an ordinary face, as if it had been stretched, kneaded out of shape, a clown’s face, the features meant for a stage and its exaggerating lights. Jesse had always heard of his brilliance and of his “good-heartedness”—which meant he tutored students for nothing, he sometimes lent them money, he was generally available for help with people who were having trouble understanding Cady.

  “Of course, none of us know Dr. Cady very well. I like his clothes myself. Excellent. He has a daughter, did you know?—a brilliant young woman in chemistry, biochemistry, something like that. At Harvard.”

  Jesse nodded vaguely. He wondered how long Monk would keep on talking.

  “Look, Jesse, don’t be offended. I only wanted to say hello to you. We had a fascinating conversation that day, do you remember? a few weeks ago? You said you had insomnia, just like me.”

  “Did I?” Jesse did not remember this.

  “Yes, you mentioned it. I have insomnia too. But it gives us more hours of the day, it prolongs our conscious lives—right? Of course, I have a photographic memory and am therefore something of a freak. You’re not like that, are you? You don’t have a genuine photographic memory?”

  “Not the real thing, no,” Jesse said coldly.

  “You’re not a freak, no, I didn’t think so. There’s a fourteen-year-old kid in physics here, do you know about him? Skinny, pop-eyed, a real genius. He knows everything. He’s going right for the Ph.D., the hell with the B.A. He makes me feel very old suddenly. Did I tell you I’m contemplating another kind of life?”

  “No.”

  “Not marriage, like you, but another kind of life altogether.…”

  In spite of himself, Jesse felt curious. “What would you do?” he asked.

  Monk shrugged his shoulders. “Retreat. Retire. I think of Northern Minnesota, I think of lakes and pure water and silence … I’d like to write poems, I’d like to wear this perpetual stink off my hands.… But they’d need a doctor up there; sure enough some female would start to give birth and they’d call me in, and I’d be Dr. Monk again, I couldn’t escape.… I put in a year as a G.P., you know.”

  Jesse did not remember if he knew this or not—but why should he have known it? He was not a friend of Monk’s.

  “Everyone thinks of dropping out occasionally,” Jesse said. It was the first thing he had really said to Monk; he felt Monk’s satisfaction.

  “Jesse, you should call me Trick. My friends call me Trick. My name is Talbot Waller Monk, an impossible name, obviously uttered by my mother as she came out of the anesthetic, and so everyone calls me Trick. Do you know why?”

  His manner was open and childlike and yet not very sincere. “I don’t know why,” Jesse said. “Maybe you play tricks on people.”

  “No, tricks are vulgar … mere tricks are vulgar,” Monk laughed. “No. I simply push the logistics of a situation as far as it will go; I exploit the dimension of the possible rather than the probable. But I don’t intrude upon anyone’s destiny. It’s all predictable, in a way.”

  Jesse had heard of his practical jokes at second and third hand, but he had never paid much attention to them.

  “I did a fairly good impersonation of Rothman last fall, when he couldn’t make a genetic talk at Michigan State. They thought I was the great Rothman himself,” Monk laughed. “But really I was much better because I can at least speak the English language. It was very strange, there were people there who had known him … and yet they believed I was Rothman for some reason.…”

  “You don’t look anything like him.”

  “Of course not. He’s a Jew from New York, slumming out here, and I’m an archetypal Midwestern personality. Actually, I’m very prejudiced. In the interests of science I hide my bias, but in my soul I’m really anti-Semitic. Come on, don’t look so surprised, why can’t we be honest with each other? You and I are Midwestern types. Look at us. We even look something alike, in spite of my ugly face. I’m really very narrow in spite of my girth.” His face had flushed with a kind of fanciful shame. Jesse stared at him, uncomprehending.

  “Well, it’s late, I should be leaving,” Monk said. But he did not move. Something caught his eye: a towel of Jesse’s on a rack just inside his closet. “Who did you steal that from, someone with the initials JP?—that towel, I mean. But no, never mind, I’m too curious for my own good. I only wanted to say hello to you and to congratulate you.”

  “On what?”

  “Oh, on your work, your good grades, your industry, all that.… Cady asks to see the good papers and he was impressed with yours. Especially when I told him you weren’t really enrolled in the course. He’s got this idea that people out here, non-Harvard people, are idiots, and when anyone does well it seems to astonish him. He asked me a few questions about you. I told him what I knew—nobody knows much about you, Jesse, except that you’re bad competition—you’ve been around for a while but nobody knows much. I ran into my old friend Anne-Marie Seton the other day—”

  “Anne-Marie? Do you know her?”

  Monk seemed to be screwing up one side of his face, about to wink, but at the last moment—as if guessing that Jesse was on the verge of anger—his face relaxed. It took on an appearance of slack, respectful, moronic seriousness. Jesse’s heart began to pound as if he were in the presence of something deadly.

  “Yes, of course I know Anne-Marie. I knew her when she was in nursing school. She lives in Ann Arbor with her mother … a pretty girl.…”

  He spoke quickly and tonelessly, with a kind of apologetic smile.

  “It just occurred to me,” Monk said, “in talking with Cady, that I didn’t know you either. I think I would like to know you. As a scientist I have a natural interest in superior personalities.” Now his manner changed, the mock-apologetic look drained away; he became again lordly, decorous, very patient, as if he were much older than Jesse. Jesse felt a renewal of his initial assessment of this man, made years ago: he was a puzzle. But Jesse had no time for puzzles. “A superior personality reduces me to Jell-O. In the presence of the great Benjamin Cad
y I provide an ashtray for him with my hands, automatically, unconsciously, and he taps his ashes out in my hands just as automatically, accepting me as an ashtray without even thinking about it. I feel flattered. I run out to get him coffee, but it can’t just be ordinary coffee; he’s very fussy. I arranged for the apartment he has. His daughter is coming to join him. I arranged for that. We sit in his office practically knee to knee, talking, but then something happens and he doesn’t seem to want to talk about his work, he wants to talk suddenly about custom-built automobiles or Mozart or an Italian cheese, and I feel my soul deflate, the air seep out of it tragically.… What good is it, really, a life of science? A life in science?”

  “There isn’t any other life,” Jesse said.

  “Oh, hell.”

  “There isn’t any other life,” Jesse repeated.

  “Why not?”

  When Jesse did not answer, Monk pressed his fist against his chest and held that position for several seconds, as if he were thinking very seriously. “No, you’re wrong. We’re devoting our lives to bodies, masses. We’d be better off perfecting explosives. Man is a mouth and an anus. Man isn’t worth our devotion.”