The Song is You (2009)

by Arthur Phillips

  “Never Gonna Love Anyone (but You)” ended, and his iPod offered a Liverpudlian pop star’s country-western spoof, “No Inhibition,” the chorus being, “All my serotonin’s done gone been reuptook.” Julian began to sprint.

  He had held hands and exchanged vows under flowering magnolia branches and supportive stars to the applause of friends and family. He had been present when a head crowned through the blood-red dawn of his wife’s vulva. And he had sat immobile, thumbtacks piercing his throat and eyes, ready to tear the skin from his face, as that same little head was covered again by moss and blood-rich dirt. And he had come back from that day. One can. He could. Not all the way back, but far enough to realize that it was not the only thing that had ever happened or ever would happen to him, although there were days still, despite his efforts, when he could barely manage to hope that anything would ever happen again, and he would quote animal television or songs to himself and get in the shower, just get in the shower and get out of the shower.

  Running from the shower to play her the song in his head, the last time he tried, overexcitedly bounding from a weeping shower to play her the song that would fix it all: What was the song? What song could have explained anything at all? That mix-tape urge, the well-plucked quote, the song that would hit the right note and express what he could not; it was a romantic-comedy myth and, like all of them, useless once you’d hurt each other badly enough. (Of course, his job was to fill the airwaves with even less plausible myths, that joy and love were found in yogurt containers and hair fixative, for example, though, to be fair, he’d once believed that even this was sort of true, once.)

  Rachel coming to a set in the middle of shooting, presenting him with a gift: a canvas director’s chair with GENIUS stitched across its back strap. It was a bite-and-smile ad, early in his career, and contrary to the seat, he was failing at it, and beginning to panic slightly, when Rachel arrived. There was chip dust and nausea in the air, take 44 or 444 or 4,444, the poor actor visibly sickened now at the sight of the approaching chip—what had the the line been? That’s more crunch than a man can stand. “Seriously? Oh, my God, Jules, you can’t make him do that again,” Rachel insisted. “He’ll have grounds to sue you, and I’ll represent him.” And what had she done exactly? Somehow lightened the mood, relaxed the product manager, brought the actor a drink, and whispered something to him, touched him on the shoulder, somehow achieved what Julian couldn’t.

  Julian reached his front door, and the iPod offered some modal monks, a craze of twenty years before for Gregorian chant, reminding even the savviest ad guy that you can just never, ever know what might hit. He stood on his stoop in the icy rain and spun the dial looking for that Irish singer.

  7

  “BABY BOY,” said his brother, looking up from Julian’s couch where he hovered over pens, maps, and forms like a vulture over carrion. “You run in this weather? Self-hatred.”

  Julian battled his slurping shoes. “I feel like we said twelve o’clock. And I feel like I never gave you a new key.”

  “A man of deep feeling, but clumsy with facts.”

  Aidan, older than Julian by almost a decade, had for many years won what passed for a living from his arsenal of facts. Wielding five jagged, unfinished master’s degrees—paleontology, criminology, Russian literature, social work, and Ottoman history; his business card read “Aidan F. Donahue, A.B.D. (mult.)”—he wrote crossword puzzles and entries for encyclopedias of various arcana, as well as friction fiction for gentlemen’s magazines (under the name Anna Karenin, as whom he also answered lifestyle and intimate grooming questions). He competed in drawings, radio call-ins, magazine sweepstakes, trivia nights in bars (where he hustled by playing drunk and dim in early rounds to juice the betting, answering “Henry the ninth” or “You know, that king who looks like a playing card”). He had contracted by age fifty-four a chronic inability to wed or cook, though he had a useful case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and his miniature, rent-controlled apartment—closing in from all sides with books and games—was, where possible, alphabetical.

  Tuesday nights, having elided certain facts, he was slightly paid by an understaffed community mental-health center to lead a support group for divorced fathers. His near degree in paleontology served just as well as one in psychology would have, and Aidan was legitimately therapeutic for the distraught dads who had bonded with young sons over the study of dinosaurs and now, with limited custody, were burdened with highly emotional expertise in a field their super-sonically aging children had tired of under their pooh-poohing mothers’ roofs. Group therapy scored rapid successes as all thwarted solid paternal emotion was sublimated into gassy arguments over whether T. rex had feathers. “That’s okay,” Aidan consoled. “You have a right to feel that.”

  Outsiders who knew both brothers were rare, but they could reasonably have expected Aidan to grimace from envy of his younger brother’s wealth, glamour, suavity. Aidan was the taller, but beyond the long nose over the puppety overbite and the lower lip buried under a miswoven shag rug of black beard, he lacked Julian’s symmetries and modern packaging. And yet, despite his high-top sneakers and pill-dispensing cardigans, his sea serpent’s breath and perennially pollinating dandruff, he viewed Julian with a steady and loving condescension, equal but opposite to the fond condescension the younger man felt for him. Aidan said pityingly more than once to his own laughter, “Pee-wee, you grew up so much in the old man’s shadow, you should really only have one good leg: the one that got some sun.”

  “I’ve advanced to the third round,” he said today, drumming his palms arrhythmically on the papers coating Julian’s square table of green-edged glass. “And I could use your help. They want to know what color Jaguar I want if I win. I’ll never drive the death trap, but for resale value, what do you advise?”

  Aidan journeyed into the thickets of his world for weeks and months, answering his phone or not, based on nothing Julian could ever identify (except around the time of the Incident), then returned to Julian’s civilization without fanfare, as if he’d seen his brother only yesterday. His life struck outsiders, sometimes even Julian, as relentlessly depressing and claustrophobic, scraped together from the slightest opportunities, led in crooked spaces, under low, flaking ceilings, constrained by unforgivingly binding finances. But Aidan was an optimist, and from these unpromising materials he lathed a life of romance, provoking and then tilting against his enemies—game-show producers, patent-office clerks, rival domain-name claim jumpers—with a zest for combat.

  “You’re looking spry, Cannonball,” Aidan said to his brother, who was basketing sweats and slush-spattered socks. He looked Julian over just once before returning to the precision work of adhering a Racing Green sticker to a black spot on the sweepstakes form. “A new Boleyn on your arm?” Aidan appointed himself the keeper of all personalities he came to love, most especially Julian’s, and he viewed them as objective and immutable, to be rigorously preserved in their original state. His common criticisms, “That’s not like you” and “That’s beneath you” and in Julian’s case “You’re so like Dad, J, it kills me,” reflected his belief in his loved ones’ factual better natures. He strove to rinse his brother of the corrosions of cynicism, self-admiration, and philandering, for all of which corruption he blamed their father. “She won’t bring you any joy, you know.”

  Among Aidan’s most remarkable views—held either out of sincere belief or merely for the delight of proving them to lesser minds who had the audacity to debate him, and then immediately disproving them once the lesser minds capitulated—views as varied as “Shakespeare produced nothing but meretricious pap” and “Slavery is by no means obviously evil”—most confounding to Julian was Aidan’s dislike of music. Not indifference, but active dislike. “There’s one Bach sonata that I can just about bear,” Aidan would cede, implying an extensive effort to give music a fair chance. “But music is, at the very minimum, inflammatory, exclusionary, divisive, encouraging of snobbery and solipsism.”


  “Can you make this stop?” Aidan now asked vaguely, waving at the air as if bees were approaching his ragged beard with colonial intent. “I tried to turn on your television, but your vast array of remote controls stymied me. You obviously buy the same brand for each device to make it impossible for visitors to control your environment, and then you take narcissistic pleasure in being called to rescue them, infantilizing them and making of yourself a heroic figure.”

  Julian walked to the stereo, passing the bookshelf and rubbing the balding spine of a red velour photo album for luck, then turned off the quiet voice and guitar of Joao Gilberto. “You entered on your own and picked up a remote control in my absence, and that was due to my narcissistic tendencies?”

  “A red herring, sir. You could have invited me in, told me to make myself at home, summoned the vicious squawking music all by yourself, and I would have been powerless to squelch it, even with all these glittering black simulacra of deistic control laid out before me like so many thunderbolts. But you will tolerate no Zeus but yourself.” Aidan spoke without looking up, intent as he was upon sketching on one of his contest forms, smiling behind his mustache at the geometric perfections and pretzel logic of his psychological profiling. “The administrators require,” he said of his drawing resembling a maze, “a map to get to my apartment to deliver the prize.”

  There was no point mocking Aidan’s credulity by asking why the sweepstakes prize van would have any trouble negotiating Manhattan’s numbered streets. Julian couldn’t guess what the answer would be, but he knew it already existed, and he didn’t ask. Aidan told him nevertheless, having sensed that someone could suspect him of foolishness or credulity: it was not because the prize committee actually needed a map but rather that they had “no corporate interest in engaging in an enterprise with a partner in whom cynicism is so dominant that he cannot even agree to play a simple game. If I laughed at the map, as you do, they would know that I would laugh at them when accepting their money. They don’t want Bobby Fischer holding up the giant check with a sneer …” He trailed off, looked down. Bobby Fischer was an unfortunately apt example, Aidan’s whirring gears stamping the analogous coin before he could stop himself. “Rachel sends her love,” he concluded, clumsily collaring a new subject and prematurely mumbling the message he’d meant to lay out later, with more finesse and alcohol.

  Aidan had come for lunch with Julian as a tentative ambassador, empowered to discuss semi-reconciliation by the sister-in-law whom he had loved since she nursed him after the Incident. But the inadvertent Bobby Fischer reference brought to his mind the Incident brought to mind the woman he credited with saving his life afterward brought to mind that she had asked him to test the waters in Julian’s home, and then the words were out—”Rachel sends her love”—self-revelatory in a hundred ways, the embarrassing autonomy of his intricate and rigidly trained mind.

  “You see her much, do you?” Julian changed direction, flopped in a towel onto the chair across from Aidan, feeling almost equal to the task of mapping his brother’s patterns of thought.

  The pejorative “know-it-all” is no more fair than any other applied to some poor outcast who did not choose and cannot control an unpopular trait. Aidan had liked producing the answers since as early as he could recall; he couldn’t help it. A rare question he could not answer: When did you first feel that perfect inner completeness that comes from answering a question posed by a teacher, a parent, another child, a TV-cartoon professor?

  Aidan could not relax in the presence of unanswered trivia, and to be cut off mid-answer was physically uncomfortable, a sour taste in the throat and an ache in the rectum. (Julian, age six: “How do you spell parrot?” Aidan, age sixteen: “P-A-R-” Julian: “Wait, no, I know it, R-O-T, right?” Aidan: “Please don’t do that. Please don’t ask me if you know the answer.”)

  Considering some people’s negative reaction at being shown up by a child, Aidan could never be certain of receiving praise for being right. The only unwavering approval came from his mother and, later, from Julian, but only when Julian was between four and thirteen years old and saw in the giant genius an almost unearthly being. (Julian, age twelve, puzzling over a biology textbook: “How do we know Lamarck is wrong and Darwin is right?” Aidan, age twenty-two: “Cannonball, if Lamarck was right, we’d both have one leg.”) So, in an environment usually annoyed by him, it must have been genetic, this pleasure in knowing something about everything. If, by the way, Lamarck is wrong and the other fellow right, then Aidan’s genetic mutation might have shown some usefulness, either for earning or for mating. It didn’t. His dominant personality trait was therefore dismissable by evolutionary biology as irrelevant (one of the reasons that for many years Aidan tried to defend intelligent-design theory; it would have been nice to feel he existed for a good reason).

  By the time he was fifteen, having the facts at his fingertips was so essential and habitual to him that he defined himself as that—knowledge itself, a superhero or Greek god of data. And with that conscious self-identification, a loop began to carve itself in his mind. As with dance students who feel, as they improve, that the music they have long practiced to must be slowing down, so Aidan’s speed of recall and reply had always to accelerate or he felt not just his quirky powers failing but he himself, his soul, melting away from inside him, as if he were being deboned, leaving only a heap of flabby skin and spotty beard to be stomped on and torn by all the world’s passing cleats and high heels. When he moved to New York in his early twenties, when speed was still paramount to him, he was answering all questions—even from strangers asking directions in the subway—as if he not only had the answer but had even known that that question was going to be asked. His reply would begin most pleasurably before the question finished.

  And so, the Incident. Aidan was fifty-three when, in peak mental condition, he scaled to the apex of the television game-show mountain and in that thin and pure air was accepted to compete on Jeopardy!, a trivia contest whose gimmick was the reversal of questions and answers (Quizmaster: “Its capital is Paris.” Contestant: “What is the capital of France?”). This show had long loomed as Aidan’s destiny, watched obsessively, statistically analyzed, trained for, auditioned for again and again, meditated over, contemplated with teachers and trivia-bar comrades and the two sufficiently drunk girls in college whom he once convinced to play strip Trivial Pursuit with him, but whom he then released, with his apologies, before things went too far.

  The day came. He performed well, unseating a champion and then holding that title himself for two more days, winning more cash than he had earned in the previous three years, before his ghastly end.

  The fourth day, endowed with purpose, as if fulfilling an ancient prophecy, he opened the game by quickly clearing two categories: “Space Travel” and “The Underworld.” With only a few seconds before a commercial break, Aidan selected “Whose Fault?” for $1,000. The host read out the question beaming white-on-blue from millions of screens across the country:

  THE 1347 BLACK DEATH WAS

  CAUSED BY YERSINIA PESTIS,

  CARRIED TO EUROPE BY THESE

  UNWELCOME INTERLOPERS.

  Aidan clicked his signal button, the podium lights circling his name illuminated, the host called Aidan’s name, and Aidan, with the same look of stern satisfaction he had worn for three days, replied: “Who are the Jews?”

  Fans of the show, and Aidan’s brother and friends, long debated whether the episode should have been broadcast at all, or whether this single moment could have been edited out. But if it had, how would anyone have understood Aidan’s cement silence for the remaining twenty-two minutes or his refusal even to make a guess for the game’s final, written question?

  “Ohhh, nnnnnnoooo,” came the host’s pained reply. “Saul?”

  “What are rats?” the furious competitor to Aidan’s left nearly shouted, though the director perversely (or in paralyzed wonder) kept the camera on Aidan, whose face now displayed an amazing a
rray of legible thought, projected with clarity even through his beard and mustache and glasses. He had known the answer was “Rats”—it was a gimme. They would have accepted “fleas” as well. He did not believe, had never believed, that Jews carried the plague. He had never held an anti-Semitic belief in his life. He didn’t hate any group, except idiots, defined as anyone less intelligent than Aidan but who believed himself to be more intelligent. He had Jewish friends (though not for much longer in most cases). These thoughts visibly pass first.

  Then comes the pain of having been not just wrong (a clenching around the nose and upper lip that his friends and family knew well) but having appeared insane, even evil, on national television. Then, as Aidan’s eyes narrow and slowly move to his left in an unfortunate expression that TV translates as suspicion, the canny viewer will see that Aidan is noticing only now that Saul Fish of Saint Louis Park, Minnesota, is definitely Jewish. Saul went on to answer nearly all the remaining questions, winning the game by a wide margin as Aidan simply stopped trying, his signal button dangling untouched at his side.

  Aidan was not much comforted telling himself that the speed of synaptic connections required for high-stakes competitive trivia will cause the best players’ brains to bypass, simply for convenience, certain neural gateways (such as self-censorship), and in the case of a brain like Aidan’s, the risk of affectless information hitching a ride from one memory bank (“Carriers of Bacilli”) to another (“Famous Racist Slurs,” over the bridge word interlopers) was unavoidable.

  Aidan, in the months between the recording and the broadcast, nearly convinced himself that the producers would avoid airing his disgrace to the nation. He even returned to trivia nights in bars from Harlem down through Brooklyn and onto Staten Island, where one Saturday he hustled well enough to finish four hundred dollars up and still leave the local quizzicists believing he’d just been lucky. That night, feeling almost himself again, he came home, turned on the television, and saw the ad he’d recorded months before, in the studio before taping his first game, “Hi, I’m Aidan Donahue of New York City. Watch me this Monday on Jeopardy! right here on WABC.” His victorious debut was forty-eight hours away; his foregone conclusion would follow seventy-two hours later.