True Believers

by Kurt Andersen

  Nazis! I’d never seen Peter so excited. I was excited, too. There were four of them, men who looked to be in their early twenties, dressed in khaki trousers and long-sleeved brown shirts, each wearing a swastika armband just above his left elbow. We got only intermittent glimpses of the Nazis, because half a dozen cops had formed a protective circle around them, and scores of angry bystanders had formed a circle around the police cordon. Shockingly, the librarian from Locust Junior High shouted at the Nazis—”Crawl back under your rocks!” I had never seen more than one or two people at a time so upset, let alone a whole crowd.

  “Sick boys,” my father muttered. I wondered what it felt like for him seeing Nazis again, twenty years after the end of the war. I’d seen old pictures of fascists wearing swastikas, but it was something else again to see the real things, those black right angles on bright red. After a while my fascinated horror cooled to curiosity—How do they earn a living? Where did they get the armbands?—and I realized these four losers were playing Nazis, not entirely different than the way we used to play European secret agents and killers.

  The Winnetka police chief arrived, made his way through the crowd, and walked to the very center, where he spoke quietly for a minute to the Nazis. Then the Nazis, accompanied by a phalanx of cops, walked out of the park. People applauded, which made it seem even more like a theatrical performance.

  It was after seven when the official show began. One of the women in charge of the North Shore Summer Project stepped up on the small unpainted wooden platform. As she delivered her introduction, the buzz of cicadas and crickets got louder and louder and then stopped the instant before she uttered the speaker’s name. As he took the stage and we all clapped, the sun dipped beneath the boughs along Maple Street and bathed him and us in light. My first thought: how young he looked.

  “He’s a doctor?” Peter said loudly over the applause. “I thought he was a priest.”

  “A Ph.D.,” I explained to my brother as he snapped shut his James Bond 007 Shooting Attaché Case and started clapping.

  We were no more than twenty yards away from the stage. Malcolm X had been assassinated a few months earlier giving a speech in New York. If Peter’s gun were real, I thought, he could easily shoot Dr. King from where we sat.

  When Dr. King said we all needed to “go all out to end segregation in housing” right here on the North Shore, a few people booed, but immediate cheering and clapping by the multitude, including us, drowned them out. “Every white person,” Dr. King told the thousands of white people, “does great injury to his child if he allows that child to grow up in a world that is two thirds colored and yet live in conditions where that child does not come into person-to-person contact with colored people.” When I sneaked a look at Violet, she was wiping tears from her eyes. I knew it wasn’t exactly what Dr. King had in mind, but I did wonder if she appreciated the person-to-person contact we had with her.

  I was very glad to have been there. When he delivered lines I’d read and heard on TV—”We must learn to live together as brothers or we will perish together as fools”—it was like when I’d finally seen the Beatles at the International Amphitheatre and knew all the lyrics by heart. Martin Luther King was saintly and moving, but what thrilled me that night was the antagonism he stirred up—the Nazis, the spontaneous anti-Nazi counterprotest, the booing, the spontaneous anti-booing. Also the fact that Chuck Levy was served by Chan Payne at the chuck wagon, ate a piece of Wonder bread touched by the fingers that had touched my breasts, and only I was aware of the encounter.

  17

  A few weeks after King’s speech in Winnetka, thousands of Negroes in Los Angeles burned and looted hundreds of buildings in their neighborhood for days. I still have the Newsweek about the Watts Riots in my moldering-cardboard-box archive: on the cover is a picture of four white National Guardsmen holding rifles in an open Jeep at the front of a convoy driving toward the photographer on a wide, empty L.A. boulevard, with the headlines LOS ANGELES: WHY? and, honest to God, THE RIOTS IN COLOR. It was also the week of the twentieth anniversary of the end of World War II, an anniversary that is, astonishingly, mentioned nowhere in the magazine. Can you imagine? We are now so compulsively anniversary-crazy, I think, because people are much more comfortable looking backward than forward. The past, they think, doesn’t alter, isn’t confusing or frightening, cannot loom.

  Stewart has been sending me terse text-message bulletins every week or so since I asked for his help. “Working it,” one said. Then: “Might have found a new way to retrieve something interesting, but no promises.” This morning, when I get off my plane in Newark, I receive another: “Still working it. Stay tuned. P.S.: Your middle name is Scattergood? LOVE that. And your old man: Hollaender, Nils R., DOB 3/29/20, Danish national naturalized 1946—that him?” As I wait in the taxi line, I answer yes, yes, and yes. My taxi trip from Newark airport to New York City costs more than my bus trip from New York to Miami will cost.

  Greta’s not home from work yet when I arrive at their apartment, and Waverly’s in her bedroom, so it’s just Jungo and me. He makes me put on special battery-powered glasses to watch his 3-D TV, and I try to sound enthusiastic. “Those cows do look real,” I say. “I’ve never seen cows like that before.”

  “Breathtaking, right?”

  I won’t go quite that far. I take off the glasses. “Cool,” I say, and glance at the clock on the TV: 6:03. “How about a martini?”

  “Sorry, no gin, but let me see …” Jungo crouches down by the cabinet under the kitchen sink, one in which most people keep a garbage can and poisons. He reaches deep into the back, feeling for dusty bottles. “Sambuca? No? Wait, here’s a little souvenir bottle of tequila we received at some event. It is what it is.”

  “I’ll pass, don’t worry about it.” I haven’t adjusted to Greta’s teetotaling, Even though I don’t eat sugar, I keep plenty on hand for guests. I’ve never expected the people around me to pay a price for my illness. On the other hand, maybe I’m an insensitive jerk.

  Seth shows up, and my motherly pleasure in seeing him has some extra zing because he’s brought a cold bottle of sauvignon blanc.

  When I left Jack and moved to L.A., Seth was living with us at age twenty-four and told me that even though he knew it was ridiculous, he felt abandoned, like the little boy in Kramer vs. Kramer. I still send Seth a few hundred dollars a month, even though when I was his age, I was on my third full-time grown-up job and had a four-year-old.

  As a boy, he was a math-and-technology whiz, and we always figured he’d be the scientist, not our artist-philosopher Greta. He was a semifinalist in the Intel Science Talent Search, and even got a patent for his project, a digital camera sensor and software that allow you, as you’re taking a picture, to select any section of the image and replace it with adjacent background bits; in other words, he invented a simple way to make people disappear from photos on the fly. I thought it was a brilliant, perverse work of conceptual art, but eighteen-year-old Seth expected it to make him rich—a cheap VampireCam for kids, since vampires can’t be photographed. I guess he was ahead of the curve, vampire-wise, because the camera companies weren’t interested.

  Seth suspected he’d been screwed by backroom corporate malfeasance. Eventually, he forgave me for refusing to file suit against Intel on his behalf, but when I sold the big family apartment after Jack died two years ago, thus requiring Seth, at age twenty-eight, to move out and find his own place, he told me I didn’t have his back, “just like with Intel.” He’s now an electronic musician of whom certain cognoscenti are very respectful. Like father, like son. Except he’s a lot more fun than his father. Seth calls himself Seth Hollander instead of Seth Wu, because he doesn’t want avant-garde music people to think he’s “some kind of Miley Cyrus or Sean Lennon or something,” trying to coast on the reputation of his avant-garde composer father. “I want to be obscure on my own,” he said when he asked permission to start using my surname professionally.

  In addition to th
e wine, Seth has brought along a medal he recently won in Reykjavík, and the award citation, which calls his music “a sui generis hybrid of extraterrestrial neo-baroque strings and musique concrète interlarded with fat grime beats.”

  “That’s wonderful, Seth! Wow. But tell this old lady who hasn’t bought new music since Talking Heads what ‘fat grime beats’ are.”

  “The turntable sounds I simulate on the computer and use as percussion. What you thought were timpani.”

  “Here you go, Mom,” Jungo says as he hands me a tumbler of wine. Perhaps other mothers-in-law actually enjoy being called “Mom” by their children’s spouses.

  “Jungo, Greta tells me you’re in the running for a new job, at Princeton?”

  “Yup—director of institutional effectiveness. Big process-reengineering gig. Setting up an innovation pipeline. Giving back.”

  I nod, even though I understand what he means about as well as I do fat grime beats. Having glanced at thousands of freshly dealt business cards over the years, I’m accustomed to having no idea what particular job titles mean. When Greta first met him, Jungo was a “coordinator of learning immersion experiences targeting value shoppers.”

  “That’d be a serious commute,” I say.

  “It is what it is,” Jungo says. “About an hour and a quarter.”

  “Bullshit,” Seth corrects, “two hours door to door if you’re lucky.” I don’t mean to be flip about my son’s illness, but his symptoms of mild autism spectrum disorder often strike me as bracing and admirable.

  “Well,” I say, “there’s one key to institutional effectiveness—three hours on the train every day to deal with all the emails in your in-box about institutional effectiveness.” I am joking, sort of, but Jungo nods earnestly. This is an established pattern with us. The first night I met him, he told me he was investing in a friend’s company that contracted with private schools to pick lice out of children’s scalps for $150 per kid, and I’d thought he was joking. A few years ago, when I said the lice-picking firm should expand into “high-margin artisanal bedbug removal,” he didn’t realize I was joking.

  Greta arrives home, laden with plastic bags. I’d offered to spring for dinner out, but she was adamant about eating at home, “to have a real old-fashioned family dinner,” so we are eating microwaved Whole Foods sole amandine and broccolini with garlic.

  During the meal, Waverly brings up the work in Greta’s lab on visual processing, how fascinated she is by the fact that ten billion bits of information reach the eye every second but ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent never get to the brain.

  Seth comes alive. “Machines kick our asses in so many ways.” He saw The Matrix seven times the first two weeks it was in theaters. “It’s like we’re stuck with a permanent dial-up connection in here,” he says, tapping his right temple. “It’s fucking insane.”

  Jungo frowns, and I ask Greta if Waverly’s statistic is correct.

  “It’s a lot worse than that,” she says. “Our conscious visual perceptions are based on just a few hundred bits from those billions of bits of information the retina collects. The brain takes those few specks, this very, very rough sketch, and then … imagines the rest of the image.”

  This is why I find Greta’s work more interesting than that of almost anyone else I know, including mine. “So everything we think we’re seeing,” I ask, “everything we’re sure looks just so—the salt shaker, the piece of broccolini, it’s all just a guess? Really? A prediction our brains are making?”

  “More or less, probably, yeah,” Greta says, standing, taking her plate and mine away, “and consciousness in general probably has a lot of features like that.”

  “It’s not a bug,” Seth shouts, “it’s a feature!’”

  “We think we know why we think something,” Greta continues, “or why we feel a certain way, but our minds hide the mental processes from us that produced those thoughts and feelings. Some people think that could be a main point of consciousness—hiding the processing states from ourselves.”

  “I find the point-oh-oh-oh-oh percent thing sort of beautiful.”

  “Of course you do, Glenda,” Seth says to me. “Every glass half full, even the cracked, empty ones.”

  Seeing silver linings is one of the family caricatures of me, along with working too hard and being a stickler for accuracy.

  “Good old PMA,” Jungo says, giving me a thumbs-up. This stands for “positive mental attitude,” which he likes to think is the one trait the two of us share.

  “Beautiful how, Grams?”

  “Because it means that simply in order to see, we’ve got to be like artists all the time, every waking moment, constantly taking those few dabs of information and using them to imagine this whole complex, panoramic picture of reality.” We’re each the god of our own experience, the maker of all that is, seen and unseen.

  Greta and Jungo exchange a quick, weird look. “Who wants apple crisp?” she says. “It’s sugar-free, Mom.”

  “Thanks, sweetie.” I’m irritated by well-intentioned people who make special accommodations for my diabetes, but they are trying to be nice, so I never say it annoys me. “With a tiny scoop of the vanilla, please,” I tell Greta.

  Over dessert, she resumes the brain conversation. “There’s a very senior guy at our lab who’s convinced he’s figured out the function of this entirely mysterious area of the brain, this area at the very top, V7, that we know is somehow connected to visual processing. He thinks it’s semi-vestigial. He thinks it might be the part of the brain that allowed us, eons ago, to see energies and colors we don’t see anymore. He thinks it’s why people used to believe more easily in magic and angels and things. ‘The cerebral seat of enchantment,’ he calls it.”

  “Is he possibly right?” I ask.

  “He’s got no data. It’s more like a hunch.” She pauses, takes a deep breath. “We worry he may be going a little loopy.”

  Jungo shoots her the same look he did before, but this time she avoids his glance.

  Sometime after midnight, I’m all alone in their living room working on my laptop, chewing my last Nicorette of the day.

  “Hi.” Not all alone: Greta has appeared.

  “Hi,” I whisper back.

  The bathrobe suggests she means to join me for a while. She sits at the other end of the couch. “Are you entirely sure you’re up to this? The bus trip and chaperoning them down there while they’re doing their Occupy thing? You know, you’re not obligated to prove you’re the coolest grandma on the planet.”

  “It’ll be fun for me.”

  She tucks her legs under her, her silence signaling skepticism.

  “It’ll be an adventure,” I say.

  “You’re not seventeen.”

  “I’m not elderly, either. Anyway, you ought to be happy she’s willing to be chaperoned. Another kind of kid would just take off and to hell with whatever you said.”

  “A kid like you at her age?”

  “You know, I wasn’t as much of a hell-raiser as you seem to think.”

  “Mom, what did you mean last month when you said you’ve been discovering new memories that you’re putting in the book?”

  “What?”

  “We were talking on the phone, and you told me you found yourself ‘remembering more and more all the time.’ And in another call, you said you were ‘surprised’ by some of the things you were remembering.”

  “I meant that my memory is surprisingly good, crystal-clear, shockingly better than I suspected now that I’m dredging up stuff from forty and fifty years ago.”

  “Like what stuff?”

  I’m tempted to say what she used to say to me when she was a teenager: Why does everything with you have to be a cross-examination?

  “Little moments from my life, things I thought and said and did when I was eleven and fifteen and eighteen.”

  “Right. And your book is totally nonfiction, right? You’re not mixing in imaginary things with real things?”

 
; “Greta? Just what the fuck are you trying to get at?”

  “Shhh, don’t get upset. Just hear me out, okay? In the literature, there are lots of cases where intense exploration of one’s memories—like you’re doing now—can produce … unreliable results. Especially in older people.”

  “I see. This is why Waverly was so concerned about my mental soundness. You and Jungo have decided I’m senile. Un-fucking-believable.”

  “Mom, people of all ages for all kinds of neurological reasons can ‘remember’ things that didn’t necessarily happen. People generate false memories. There’s even a particular aneurysm that can occur, this one tiny artery in the brain can burst and produce … confabulation.”

  “ ‘Confabulation,’ huh? You haven’t read a word of this,” I say, pointing at my laptop with both hands, palms up, “but you’re worried preemptively that my mind’s gone kaplooey, that I’m fantasizing, making shit up that I think is real? Christ! For twenty-five years I’ve put up with you treating me like a fragile freak because of the diabetes, but I refuse to be on some kind of dementia watch for the next twenty-five years.”

  “I met your friend Alex Macallister—”

  “Oh, Jesus!”

  “—at a conference, and we had dinner. He’s extremely well versed in neuroscience on a clinical level, for a layperson, and he told me … He says you’re threatening to blackmail him, that you’ve developed some kind of morbid fantasy about, I don’t know, about … about violence that you and he committed back then, some kind of conspiracy. When you were young.”

  I feel great relief along with my anger. For the last minute I’d begun to worry—maybe Greta has noticed dementia symptoms of which I’m unaware. But no, her fears aren’t her own, they’re Alex’s doing, disinformation, part of his Gaslight plot to make me seem mentally ill. I take a breath. “Alex Macallister is evil, Greta. An evil, lying weasel.”