by Shari Lapena
She opened the door. It wasn’t a Jehovah’s Witness, but it was someone canvassing for something; she knew this instantly at the sight of the earnest, smiling person that greeted her on her doorstep, clutching a clipboard.
“Who is it?” Harold called irritably from his chair.
Audrey didn’t bother to find out. She smiled politely but firmly and said, “No thanks,” as the young woman hastened to blurt out her appeal. Audrey hated to be rude, and hoped her warm, genuine smile softened the fact that she’d just closed the door in the young woman’s face.
“Nobody,” Audrey said, and went back to the kitchen.
She glanced out the window over the sink and saw someone sitting on Harold’s bench. She did a double take, because Harold was in the living room.
It was John she realized, her heart convulsing within her—staring at his shoes.
• • •
HAROLD’S SUPERVISOR’S SECRET poll wasn’t much of a secret. Employees gossip. Did Stan ask you about Harold? What’d you say? Everybody knew that he was trying to get Harold squeezed out on a long stress leave, which is what they really called it, and that he wanted to establish his brother-in-law temporarily in Harold’s place. They placed bets on how they thought it would go. It kept things interesting.
The people at work were now pretty evenly divided about what they thought would happen. Half—the half who’d witnessed Harold yelling about the spider—thought he’d be forced off on stress leave, but the other half were betting that the brother-in-law was out of luck. Word had gotten around that Harold had been given an Action Plan. There was a certain degree of curiosity about what was in the Action Plan. Stan was saying nothing, but Harold had let it slip out around the coffee maker that he was seeing a philosopher. There had been an astonished silence in the lunchroom.
These days, Harold was wondering if maybe the anti-depressants were starting to work. He was feeling slightly less morose. Or was it just that he found himself looking forward to his visits to his philosopher?
When he went to his next appointment, Harold brought Will’s book back. He was feeling anxious because he was sure there was more to it than what he’d gotten out of it.
“So—how is your outlook today, Harold?” Will asked, settling in.
Harold didn’t know what to say. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Did you read Candide?”
Harold nodded. “Yes.”
“Great, isn’t it?”
When Harold looked uncertain, Will said affably, “It’s okay if you didn’t understand it.”
Harold smiled in relief. “Oh, good.”
“That’s what you pay me for,” Will said cheerfully. He sat back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. Harold noticed a wad of gum flattened into the tread of Will’s shoe.
“Terrible things happen to Candide, to Lady Cunegonde, to the old woman—to everyone in the novel. Terrible things happen to people in this life, as you pointed out last time. How are we to cope?”
How indeed? Harold thought bleakly.
“We must cultivate our garden,” Will said, as if that were the answer to everything.
What the hell does that mean? Harold wanted to ask, but felt too stupid. Anyway, he figured, Will already knew he was stupid, and he was paying him, so Will would surely tell him.
The young philosopher made a tent with his fingertips and explained, “The world can be unbelievably cruel. That’s a given. We have no control over that; it’s pointless to look for it. We can only do what we can, do our best to improve things within our own small sphere.”
“Make the best of things,” Harold said forlornly, unconvinced that there was any solace in this.
“No,” Will said, shaking his head. “Not passive acceptance. No. It’s more do the best we can to make things better, as far as we are able. Recognizing of course, that it may not be much.”
Harold looked at him, beginning to understand. This might be a philosophy he could live with.
“It’s one way of looking at things,” Will said. “One way to cope.”
“Maybe I’ll try that,” Harold said, thinking of the hundred calories.
Meanwhile, his philosopher was off and running, expounding on Voltaire. “Pangloss, of course, represents the optimist philosophy of Leibniz, which Voltaire despised. And I have to agree with Voltaire— the world is really fucked up. But Martin’s pessimism isn’t quite right either . . .”
Before long Harold was completely lost.
“Anything else you’d like to talk about?” Will asked eventually. He himself was curious about the dead people Harold had mentioned last time. He’d like to hear more about that. How he himself would love to speak to Voltaire—or even better—Nietzsche!
Harold knew that there was more than this to his pain and anxiety. Harold wasn’t struggling only with how to cope, how to find meaning and purpose in this life; he was also trying to come to grips with the paralyzing idea that life might go on forever. He didn’t, as Will would say, have a context. He didn’t know where he fit in the grand scheme of things, in the continuum of his own soul’s yearning upward, if that’s what it was doing. He couldn’t conceive of upward at all. He simply couldn’t see the potential upside of eternal life.
But Harold had had enough for today. And he already felt somewhat better. As he was leaving, he handed Will the cash and said, “You know, you’re really good. You should be on TV.”
• • •
AUDREY SAT NERVOUSLY in the battered chair offered to her by the employment officer. She was here to review the results of her interest and aptitude tests. She was terrified that she had no aptitudes.
The employment officer, it turned out, was not a bored young man unsympathetic to her situation, like the one who had administered the test. This one was a woman wearing a wedding ring, with childbearing hips and pictures of three children on her cluttered desk—two boys and a girl.
“Are they yours?” Audrey asked, slightly sycophantic, indicating the photographs.
“Yes,” the woman answered. Instantly, there was a rapport.
“My children are almost grown,” Audrey said. “I’m hoping to reenter the workforce now that they’re older.”
The woman smiled at her. “Well, I’ve looked at your tests,” she said, “and I think we might have just the thing for you.”
• • •
THIS WAS A match made in heaven! It was only Audrey’s second week, and already she felt like this job was something she was born to do—she’d slipped into it like a second skin.
Audrey had got herself her first job in almost twenty years—as a dispatcher at ups. She did three eight-hour shifts a week, leaving the rest of the family to fend for themselves while she was gone. It wasn’t like she’d left them high and dry though; the house was clean, the food was made ahead and left in the fridge with clearly written instructions on how to reheat it, the clothes were washed and ironed and laid out as always. They would hardly even notice she was gone.
Here was the beautiful, functional ballet for which she’d been preparing for the last twenty years! She’d brought in her small, tinny radio from the kitchen and had it tuned to a classical station, playing softly in the background. She ran things here like a perfect, efficient machine, coordinating the complex flow of trucks—an entire fleet!— and their packages seamlessly. She had more control here than she’d ever had over her children. She almost felt like God.
Now she was in the second-floor yard tower studying the dispatch computer screen in front of her. The movement of trailers among the loading docks was complicated, and timing was everything. Screw-ups caused a domino effect all down the line—resulting in costly delays or packages being loaded onto the wrong trailer, destined for the wrong city. She’d been told that she would be closely supervised for weeks before she’d be permitted to direct all the yard traffic on her own. But she so clearly had a knack for this that her supervisor had already taken to reading the newspaper, only looking up now
and then.
Today there were three drivers who moved the trailers around under Audrey’s direction. Now, studying the computer screen intently, Audrey saw that a truck from Sudbury had just pulled into the yard to drop its trailer in the waiting area. She picked up the control CB and gave her order. “Ivan, pick up trailer number C7942 from the waiting area and drop it at bay 17.”
“Trailer C7942 to bay 17, copy that.”
Audrey entered the completed move on the computer.
When it started to get busy, Audrey didn’t miss a beat. In a short span she efficiently ordered off three trailers that were filled up with outgoing packages, replaced them with empty trailers before the conveyor belts overloaded and started spilling packages over the sides, and moved out three other trailers that had just been emptied to open up docks to accept trailers from trucks that were just arriving.
She was supposed to be sitting down, but she liked to do this on her feet. Every once in a while—when she’d managed a tricky maneuver with a few seconds to spare, and the music was particularly moving—she gave a little twirl.
• • •
JOHN, AT LOOSE ends, wandered out to the backyard, where his dad was sitting on his bench in a light drizzle.
“Hey Dad,” he said, and sat down beside him, rubbing shoulders.
“Everything okay?” Harold asked.
John wasn’t going to tell him about Nicole, and that he’d broken it off with her because she’d wanted him to steal a car. His dad didn’t need that kind of information. He missed Nicole, but it was a relief to be done with all that. To his own surprise, John found himself asking, “That night you and Mom had the big fight, when you were smashing the furniture—what was that all about?” He didn’t know where he got the guts—as far as he knew, even Dylan hadn’t asked. John had seen the air bed made up on the floor in his parents’ bedroom—it had been ages, and it was still there.
Harold, equally surprised, thought for a minute. He glanced at John—almost a man. Time they all started telling the truth. Still, he hesitated. Thought about how cultivating his garden might apply in this particular instance.
“Dylan says you guys were doing a paternity test, and that’s what you were fighting about.” John couldn’t believe this had just come out of his mouth.
For a minute, neither could Harold. “He’s right,” Harold finally admitted, and looked back down at his feet. Neither of them said anything for a while; they both stared at their feet. This was a lot for both of them to digest. Eventually Harold sighed and said, “We all make mistakes.”
It looked like his dad was going to leave it at that. Finally, in desperation, John blurted out, “You mean—I’m not your kid?”
Harold’s head shot up and he looked at John. “Of course you’re my kid!”
“Oh, good,” John said.
Embarrassed, Harold looked away. “It’s Dylan that’s not mine. But I don’t want you to worry about it. It doesn’t matter. I love him just the same anyway.” As John gaped, open-mouthed, Harold looked right at him and said, “I love you, too. And your mother,” he added, almost as an afterthought. And saying it, he realized that it was true.
In spite of his confusion and dismay, John’s heart expanded like a helium balloon when he realized that for the first time ever, he knew something important that his little brother didn’t. And he couldn’t wait to tell him.
• • •
HAROLD CONTINUED TO see his philosopher. They talked about the meaning of life. They talked about life after death—for Harold had told Will all about his ghosts, and his problem with the notion of eternal life. Will was open-minded and endlessly curious. He’d even suggested trying to summon some of his favourite philosophers back from the dead for a really good discussion, but Harold had explained that he lacked the power to summon spirits at will.
“Ahh, too bad,” Will said, looking so disappointed that Harold was almost sorry. “God is dead . . . And we have killed him,” Will pronounced late one afternoon.
“Who said that?”
“Friedrich Nietzsche.” Will picked up one of the busts on the edge of his desk by way of illustration and plunked it down again.
Nietzsche, Harold thought, studying the bust, had an intense expression and an almost terrifying mustache. He looked like a madman.
“What he meant by that, is that the idea of God is no longer a viable foundation for our morality. The death of God, he felt, would lead to a recognition that there is no absolute, universal morality. Nietzsche wanted to re-examine the very foundations of human values,” Will explained.
“In more practical terms, for you, Harold, the traditional beliefs of Christianity have been undone, scuttled by rationalism and modern science—evolution and so on. We don’t really believe anymore. That wasn’t a problem for Nietzsche—he wanted to see the end of Christianity, which he saw as standing in the way of the superman. But it’s a problem for you right now, Harold—having yourself seen ample evidence of life after death, despite rationalism and modern science—because the belief in God gave purpose, some forward direction, to eternal life.”
Harold nodded, following along so far.
“We all want to find meaning—that’s what makes us human,” Will continued, leaning back in his chair, his eyes drifting above Harold’s head. “Nietzsche found meaning in creativity and freedom and the present—he didn’t want us to focus on the escape of heaven.” As usual, Will grew more passionate as he spoke. “He was sort of a precursor to Freud, in seeing instinctual energies as a driving force in the individual. But Nietzsche advocated the release and expression of these instinctual energies—which he called the ‘will to power’—” Will stopped himself, dragged his gaze from the wall above Harold’s head and looked at Harold.
Harold didn’t think he could put Nietzsche’s ideas to any practical purpose, the way he could Voltaire’s. He wondered where Will was going with this, and thought he should say something. He suddenly remembered the squirrel in his backyard, so purposeful and carefree. “Do you mean that Nietzsche thought we should live in the moment?”
Will paused. “Well, yes, I guess you could say that. You’re simplifying a bit, but yes, you’re right.”
Harold beamed with pleasure.
“Think about the Christian religion,” Will said. “Have you read Paradise Lost, by the way? No? You should. It’s the story of Adam and Eve being cast out of Paradise, because of Satan. Anyway, in Christianity, we have God, who is essentially good, and Satan, who is evil. Evil is balanced by Good; there’s a tension between them. But if we no longer have God—if, as Nietzsche says, we’ve killed him—then that leaves the question of Evil. Does Evil exist? And if we still believe Evil exists—and it’s hard not to, look around you—then where does that leave us?”
Harold saw the problem.
“For Nietzsche, this wasn’t a problem because he didn’t believe in Good or Evil—for him they simply didn’t exist. He was looking for an entirely new morality, outside the traditional notions of Good and Evil, one based on his notion of the ‘will to power.’” Will paused for a long moment. “But I’m not so sure Nietzsche was right on that one. Even without God, as human beings, I don’t think we can say that there is no absolute morality.” He fell silent, pondering deeply—as if this was something that he’d thought a great deal about. Finally he added, “But then, we have the benefit of twentieth-century history.”
“What happened to Nietzsche?” Harold asked at the end of their session, looking again at the bust.
“He went completely insane.”
“Was it—from thinking too deeply?” Harold asked.
“Maybe,” Will conceded, nodding. “Or it could have been syphilis.”
Harold enjoyed his discussions with his philosopher, but in the end, Harold didn’t know what eternal life was all about. And, for all his learning and his high forehead, his philosopher didn’t know either. It was all still an unfathomable mystery—a leap that he must take, someday.
&nb
sp; But for now, Harold took small steps.
He sat on his bench in the backyard and thought about things, even though the weather, by late November, had taken a turn for the worse. It was cold, grey, and often wet. The patch of grass in front of his bench had turned to mud, and the backyard, with the leaves stripped from the trees, felt more exposed. Even so, Harold had moments when he felt better than he had since long before Tom had died.
“Are you ready to talk?” His mother said to him one day.
“I think so,” Harold said.
“I understand that you’re angry at me, but it’s really not as bad as you think,” she said.
“I’m not angry anymore,” Harold said.
All his life he’d embraced the ordinary, Harold knew now, because his childhood had been so extraordinary. Avoidance—such a useful survival mechanism for him as a child beset by forces he couldn’t understand—hadn’t served him as well as an adult. He now understood that he couldn’t be fully alive—he couldn’t feel alive— unless he opened himself—at least a little bit—to the extraordinary.
“I just wanted you to realize that there is more to life than life, if you know what I mean.”
“I understand that now.”
“And that you can’t blind yourself to things forever. Forever is a very long time.”
“I get it, Mom.”
“You know, I’ve always considered my gift to be truly a gift—even if sometimes it was inconvenient. You have that gift too. To a more limited extent, of course.”
“I know. I see what you mean. Thanks, Mom,” Harold said.
“You’re welcome.”
These days, Harold was doing the best he could with what he had, as Voltaire advised. He’d made his peace with Audrey. She was no longer sleeping on the floor, and he’d taken to packing a treat in her lunch bag before she went off to work. He’d made his peace with Tom, too—he had to agree that tying Dylan’s acting to his grades had been a stroke of genius. And he’d finally had a talk with Dylan about his parentage.
He asked Dylan to come out and sit with him on his bench. It was awkward; Harold didn’t know how to begin. Finally, he blurted out, “Dylan—I’m not your biological father.”
