He was a strange child.
He began talking too soon—at only a few months! But more than that. She sensed it every time she picked him up … every time she put him to her breast. There was a discomfort she once described to Dr. Kyriakides as something like the sound of a piano string gone off tune. (“Dissonance,” Kyriakides supplied.) And the baby’s eyes were too observant.
It wasn’t like touching a baby, she said. It was like touching … a dwarf.
After that confession, she saw even less of John. Marga pretended that this made her unhappy, but really it didn’t. … It was nice, having some time to herself for a change.
* * *
“I remember Max more clearly than I remember Marga. Marga is just a face. Small eyes. Big body, big shapeless dresses. She wore a perfume that smelled like linden flowers. Overpowering!
“Max was different then. He had more hair. A heavy Joe Stalin moustache and rimless glasses. It was frightening. I trusted him, of course. He was the central force, the operating engine. It was obvious that everything revolved around him, everybody followed his orders.
“He taught me more than anyone else. I had plenty of professional tutors. But it was Max who would really talk to me. If I asked a question, he took it seriously. Child questions, you know: how high is the sky and what comes after it? But he understood that I didn’t want trivial answers. I wanted the true answers.
“And there was the way he looked at me.
“You have to understand how the others treated me. The other research staff, even Marga. I would sit at a little table and they would run a Stanford-Binet or a Thematic Aperception and after a while they would start to register their disbelief—or their fear, or their resentment. I was strange, anomalous, different. I was scary. I learned to recognize it—I thought of it as ‘The Look.’ After I was a year old, Marga would never touch me, never wanted to pick me up. And when she did: The Look.
“But Max was different. Max knew what I was. Took pride in me. That meant a lot.
“I decided he was my real father. That Marga was only some kind of hired nurse. Eventually, of course, they took me away from Marga altogether; and then Max was my father, or the nearest thing.
“I trusted him.
“That was a mistake.”
* * *
Susan said, “Why did they take you away from Marga?”
“She came home from the Safeway one morning and found me taking apart the radio. I was doing a pretty good job of it. I had it sorted by component size—quarter-watt resistors on the left, power supply on the right. Desoldered the parts with a needle from her sewing kit—I heated it over a candle. Burned myself a couple of times, but I was beginning to make sense of it.”
“Marga was angry?”
“Marga was frightened, I think, and angry, and she was wearing The Look—which is really a kind of horror. Changeling in the crib, worm in the cornmeal …”
“She punished you,” Susan guessed.
“She turned on the left-front burner on the Hotpoint and held my hand over it. Second-degree burns. I healed up pretty fast. But they took me away from her—or vice versa.”
* * *
It wasn’t all bad (John explained). There was more luxury than torture. He was pampered, really. And in some ways, it was an ordinary childhood. He had toys to play with. He remembered the extraordinary vividness of colors and sensations … the radiant blue luster of a crib toy, the pale intricate pastels of a sun-faded beachball; he remembered the letters etched on glass storefronts like black cuneiform (“chicken-tracks,” Max called them), pleasing but mysterious.
He remembered the day he learned to read—acquiring the phonetics and the approximations of written English, puzzling out a newspaper headline to himself. He remembered riding into town on some errand with Dr. Kyriakides, and his amazement that the angular marks on signs and windows had resolved suddenly into words—A P, USED BOOKS, WOOLWORTHS—this pleasure mixed with frustration because, having recognized the words, he could no longer see the lovely strange chicken-tracks. The marks had turned into words and words they stubbornly remained. The abstraction had displaced the concrete. Story of his life.
One by one, category by category, the objects of his perception faded into language. A tree became “tree”; “tree” became “a noun.” Categorical hierarchies exploded around him, somehow more organic than the organic things they named. For instance, the oak in front of Marga’s town house: even when he tried to focus exclusively on the texture of its bark or the color of its leaves, he triggered a network of associative ideas—gymnosperm and angiosperm, xylem and cambium, seed and fruit—that displaced the thing itself. He became afraid that his vision—that the world itself—might dissolve into a manic crystal-growth of pattern and symbol.
“It’s an inevitable process,” Max told him. “It’s good. Nothing is lost.”
John wondered whether this was true.
He began to understand the way in which he was different, though no one would really explain it and even Dr. Kyriakides dodged the subject. He learned how to slip into the research unit’s snail medical library when his keepers weren’t looking, usually during lunch hours or bathroom breaks. The neurological tomes that resided there were too advanced for him, but he could divine a little of their subject. The brain. The mind. Intelligence.
On his fifth birthday he asked Dr. Kyriakides, “Did you make me the way I am?”
After a hesitation and a frown, Max admitted it. “Yes.”
“Then you’re my father.”
“I suppose … in a way. But Marga wouldn’t understand, if you told her.”
“I won’t tell her, then,” John said.
It didn’t matter. He understood.
* * *
Outside this small room in Toronto, the snow continued to fall. Susan wondered whether Amelie could see the snow. Whether Amelie was cold—wherever she was.
The tape recorder popped up a cassette. Susan inserted a new one.
* * *
“I trusted Max until he farmed me out to the Woodwards,” John said. “Even then—at first—I gave him the benefit of the doubt.”
The explanation was plain enough. Max had explained meticulously. The research was funded by the government and now the funding had been revoked. The legality of it was questionable and people were afraid of the truth getting out. John would have to be careful about what he told the Woodwards. “Also, we won’t be able to see each other for a while. I hope you understand.”
John didn’t answer.
Max had checked the family out and they were decent enough people, an older couple, childless, referred through a contact in an adoption agency. “Obviously, they don’t know what you are. You may have to conceal your nature. Do you understand? You’ll have to become at least passably ‘normal’—for everyone’s sake.”
John listened politely, watching Max across the barrier of his polished oak desk in this indifferent room, his book-lined office. “You have to do what the government tells you,” he said to Max. John was five years old.
“Yes, I do. In this case.”
“But you’re a Communist,” John said.
Max rose slightly in his chair. “What do you mean? Who told you that?”
“Nobody told me. I watch you when people talk about politics. I watched you when Kennedy came on TV and talked about Castro. Your face. Your eyes.”
Max laughed. John was pleased: even at this terrible moment, the hour of his exile, he was able to make Max happy. “I should never mistake you for a child,” Max said. “But I always do. No, I’m not a Communist. I was at one time. During the war. I gave it up when I came to this country. My uncle died fighting for Veloukhiotis, and it was pointless—completely futile. Now we have the Generals. Is there any sense in that? I don’t believe in revolution any more.”
“But you believe in the rest of it,” John pressed. “Marxism. Leninism.”
He had read the entry under “Communism” in the Columbia En
cyclopedia and these questions had been on his mind.
“Not even that,” Max said, more soberly. “I gave it all up.”
“You stopped believing in Marxism?”
“Do you really want to know?”
John nodded.
“I stopped believing in ‘the people.’ I’m an apostate from that central faith. Marx believed that mankind was perfectible through economics. But it’s a childish idea. People talk about Stalinism, but Stalinism is only fascism with a different accent, and fascism is simply the politics of the monkey cage. The failure is here”—he thumped his chest—“in the mechanism of the cells. In our ontogeny. If you want to perfect mankind, that’s where you begin.”
“But you still believe in the perfectibility of mankind.”
“Wouldn’t you rather talk about the Woodwards? Your future?”
“I want to know,” John said.
“Whether I believe in the perfectibility of mankind? I will tell you this: human beings are cowards and thieves and torturers. That I believe. And yes, I believe the species can be improved. Why not? The only alternative is despair.”
But there’s a contradiction here, John wanted to say. How could you want to improve a thing when you despised it so entirely to begin with? What could you build out of that contempt?—especially if the contempt encompasses your own being?
But he didn’t ask. Max was going on about the Woodwards, about school—“Don’t trust anyone,” he said. “Anyone might be your enemy.”
It was a sweeping statement. Including you? John wondered. Should I mistrust you, too? Is that what this is all about?
But it was not a question he could bring himself to ask. He was not a child, Max was right; but neither was he old enough to endure the possibility that he might be fundamentally alone in the world.
* * *
Life with the Woodwards, then, began as a deception, a concealment, not always successful. But at least he understood the rules of the game. For years John chose to believe that Max would eventually come and get him.
Even if they couldn’t be together, Max was still his truest father; Max cared about him.
He banked this belief in the most private recesses of his mind; he never allowed the flame to flicker. But Max did not come. And on his twelfth birthday, after a perfunctory celebration with the Woodwards, John began to admit to himself that Max might never come.
So he broke a promise. He went looking for Max.
It was spring, and he rode a bus into the city through thawing snow-patches and muddy lots. He had packed a bag lunch, solemnly. He ate it sitting on a transit bench outside Marga’s old house, a couple of blocks from the university. Did he want to see Marga? He wasn’t sure. But no one entered or left the house. The shutters were closed and the siding had been painted eggshell blue. Maybe Marga had moved away.
He stood and walked through the raw spring air to the research complex, to Max’s office there.
He opened the door and walked in. Max looked up, maybe expecting to see an undergraduate, frowning when he recognized John. Max was older than John remembered him, fashionably shaggier; he had grown his sideburns long.
His eyes widened and then narrowed. “You shouldn’t have come here.”
“It’s good to see you, too.”
“Don’t be flippant. I could lose my tenure. People in this building have long memories.” He frowned at his watch. “Meet me in the parking lot. I have a car there—a black Ford.”
John left the building and waited twenty minutes in the pallid sunlight, shivering on the curb beside the automobile. Then Max came striding out and opened the passenger door for him. John climbed aboard. “I wanted to see you,” John said. “I wanted to talk.”
“It’s dangerous for both of us.”
“I understand. You don’t want to lose your job.”
“I don’t want to lose my job, and I presume you don’t want to be brought to the attention of any powerful interests. We’re privileged to be an inactive file in someone’s cabinet. I would like to keep it that way.”
“I thought you might try to see me. At least try.”
Max compressed his lips. “I’ve driven past the Woodwards’ house from time to time. Once I saw you walking to school. I have a contact at the Board of Education; he’s been forwarding your records—”
“But we haven’t talked.”
“We’re not allowed to talk.”
“Revolutionary,” John mocked.
“You know I’m not.”
“But you’re brave enough to bend your ethics from time to time. For instance, a little genetic manipulation.”
“Neurological, not genetic. Your genes are perfectly ordinary, I’m afraid. Do you resent it—being what you are?”
John shrugged.
Max said, “I rescued you from mediocrity.”
“You rescued me from the human race!”
“It amounts to the same thing.”
“Jesus, Max, how pathetically unimaginative!”
His rage took him by surprise: it was a sudden huge pressure in his chest. He said, “I’m more than you ever dreamed of. I could kill us both, you know. It’s been seven years. Things have changed. If I wanted you to you’d drive right off the retaining wall of this freeway. You don’t believe it? But just think, Max. Think how nice it would be. Like flying. Flying out into the void. A little gas, a little twist of the wheel. Like flying, Max—”
The words had spilled out of him. He stopped, aware of the sweat beading on Max’s brow, the way his fingers trembled on the wheel.
My God, he thought. It’s true. I could do that.
He felt suddenly cold.
“You can drop me at the off ramp,” he said.
Max pulled up obediently near a bus stop, wordless and wide-eyed. John climbed out without saying goodbye. He watched as the black Ford shuddered away from the curb and merged uncertainly with the traffic.
Twelve years old.
Alone on this empty, wide boulevard.
It was nighttime now, and very cold.
* * *
A week later, John retrieved the journals from Max’s safe.
He told the Woodwards he was sleeping over at a friend’s house. They were pleased to hear that he had finally made a friend and didn’t press him for details. He took the night bus into town and waited until the research unit was locked and dark. Then he shinnied up a maple tree and through one of the high access windows, hinged open to moderate the fierce heating system.
He took the documents from the safe under Max’s desk, photocopied them on the Xerox machine in the adjoining room, then returned the originals. He folded the copies and tucked them under his belt in order to keep his hands free.
In the corridor outside Max’s office he was surprised by a security guard.
The guard was a fat bald man in a blue suit with a pistol at his hip. He came around an angle in the hallway and stood gawking at John for a long instant before dashing forward.
John discovered that he was calm, that he was able to return the guard’s stare and stand his ground. He should have been frightened. Instead, he felt something else … a heady combination of power and contempt. Because the guard was transparent: every twitch betrayed his thoughts. He was a machine, John thought. A noisy engine of belligerence and fear.
He spoke up before the guard could find words, made his own voice calm and uninflected: “I want to leave. No one has to know I was here.” Then watched the wheels turning as the imperatives registered, uncertainty turning down the corners of the man’s mouth and narrowing his eyes. If I phone this in I’ll have to fill out a fucking report; it was as good as reading his mind. “I ought to kick your ass,” the guard began, but it was not so much a threat as a question: can I say this?
“Don’t,” John said.
The guard backed off a step.
Amazing. John knew about suggestibility and the phenomenon of hypnosis, but he was surprised at how effortless it was, how utterly pleasura
ble. He had bypassed all the barriers; he was talking now directly to the delicate core of self behind this uniform: he pictured something wet and pinkly quivering, an “ego.” It was an easy target.
He said, “Open the door at the back.”
The guard turned and led him down the hallway.
At the door the spell seemed to falter. “Thieving little bastard,” the guard said. “I ought to—”
But John silenced him with a look.
He transferred the thick manila folder of photocopies from his belt to his hand. The guard was standing directly behind him, but didn’t see—or didn’t want to.
John closed the door and listened as the lock slid home.
The night air was cold and bracing. He stood for a moment in the shadow of a tree, smiling. He felt good. Felt free. Freer than he had ever been before.
* * *
Reading the research notes, he was shocked to find Marga described as “an unemployed, gravid white female of doubtful morals”—shocked in general by the tone of callous indifference Max had assumed. But he supposed Max had already cast his lot with Homo Superior. This was contempt by proxy, the exploitation of the old order for the sake of the new. Max did not believe in “the people.” Presumably Marga was a thief and a torturer manqué.
The story of his genesis, however, the intrauterine injections and the forced cortical growth, made perfect sense. He had guessed much of this before.
In a way, the theft had been more revealing than the notes themselves. His commandeering of the security guard, his intimidation of Max a few days earlier, had forced a new discovery:he was not weak. He had allowed himself to be dominated by Max’s fears, by the idea that he was different and therefore vulnerable. How intoxicating now to suspect that he might be more than a freak: that he might be functionally superior, better at the things human beings were good at.
The Divide Page 16
