Cosmogony

by Lucy Ives

  “Right,” Jon says, “but do you think it needs a little more, a little less? I think you were correct about the androids needing to go. I haven’t really done enough research on that. I got a little too excited when I saw that Times article.”

  I try to reassure Jon that although I suggested cutting the android part, it was still pretty good. I tell him that maybe he should devote a whole story to androids.

  “A whole story on androids? I don’t know about that.” Jon takes a sip from his beer. He clears his throat, and I can tell he is about to say something he considers important. “I really like writing about androids but more as a way to think about people, you know? I don’t care about the immortal soul but, you know, some of my readers do.”

  Jon is laughing again.

  “Sure,” I start to say. I’m about to explain to Jon that this was not what I meant, but he interrupts me:

  “It just wouldn’t work. I never want to have a story that’s about one thing.”

  “But you’re so good at description!” I exclaim. I’m trying to say that I think Jon can write about whatever he wants. There’s a lot he can get away with.

  “Thank you. But I’m never going to write about androids. They have to be a side issue. You know, there was something else that seems relevant, I’m just trying to remember. Oh, yeah.”

  And Jon tells me the following story:

  When Jon was in grad school, he spent a lot of time observing people. He wasn’t a bad student, exactly, but he was studying literature and one of the things he knew about literature was that he himself could write it, and this fact troubled his relationship to scholarship, as such. Literature, as everyone knows, is a massive info leak, while scholarship mostly purports to reveal helpful stuff people really ought to know, and all Jon wanted to do while he was obtaining his degree was to give away destabilizing secrets regarding academia. This desire made it difficult to concentrate, among other difficulties. Jon got very interested in sociology, as well as cybernetics. He liked vaguely paranoid theories based on the schematization of the social sphere. He enjoyed thinking about what computing had to do with anything, partly perversely, because in spite of Apple’s bombastic presence on the home electronics scene since that 1984 Super Bowl commercial, few people in the humanities were bothering to think about what effect their word processing and emailing were having on their knowledge. Jon, by contrast, was brilliant and somewhat young.

  But these, as Jon might say, are side issues. They’re just here to give us some sense of what Jon was like. In fact, he was pretty similar then to the person he is now, except that he was unmarried and did not have a daughter.

  Also Jon had to take classes for a few years, and because of this he came into contact with other students. Among these people was a certain young woman, who is the person of interest as far as Jon’s story is concerned.

  This young woman had a problem. It was a problem that interested Jon, given his social-scientific explorations, because it both was and was not her problem. The young woman’s problem was that she was not recognizable. It wasn’t, for example, that she was invisible or that she shrank from human contact—far from it. In Jon’s account, she was more than reasonably attractive, always simply and elegantly dressed. She had a nice face, nice hair. She spoke with an amount of self-assurance that was neither excessive nor too puny. No, the young woman was perfectly visible and in no particular way repulsive, but nevertheless this did not prevent her from being largely unrecognizable in the eyes of others.

  Graduate school, it seems, is an interesting setting in which to observe such a problem play out. The reason for this is that graduate school, particularly in the humanities, is where people go to learn how to introduce themselves. This is perhaps the main skill taught to students of the humanities. The lesson was long and particularly difficult for the young woman who was not recognizable, because she was constantly having to reintroduce herself everywhere she went. For Jon it became a kind of private running joke, although one he did not dare to share with the woman herself. Whenever they were in class together, he would wait for the inevitable moment at which the professor would squint or point and ask, “And who are you?” only to be reminded that the student in question had already been known to him or her for multiple weeks, months, and even years.

  Somehow, the reminding did not serve to reinforce memory regarding the unrecognizable student. It was as if she suffered from a detachable aphasia, an amnesia she herself did not possess. It interested Jon for, as he put it, two main reasons: One, this was a psychosocial malady affecting a single organism that seemed to have come into being outside that organism’s body (and truly it was difficult to say if the problem originated with the woman or with others). Two, this was a malady to which Jon seemed, among all his peers and overlords, to be the sole person who was immune.

  Jon could recognize the woman.

  It was surprising and even semi-miraculous.

  At first Jon could barely believe it.

  Months went by, maybe a full semester, and at last Jon got up the courage to speak to the woman, with whom, if this is not already obvious, he had managed to fall deeply in love. It was not at all a difficult thing to speak to her. They went out together to a late lunch of desserts and talked a long time.

  It was also surprisingly easy to avoid the “recognition issue.” There was a nearly otherworldly quality to the woman, in that she herself seemed completely unaware that most other people never had any idea who she was. She lived, oblivious to the problem, and she was even happy.

  Jon courted her carefully. In spite of their mutual penury, they went out to many meals and talked many long talks. Jon believed that he had discovered a previously unknown plane of existence. His studies took on new meaning.

  But when summer came again, the woman departed for the West Coast. This was years before the tech bubble burst, a fact that dates Jon a bit, and it seemed like someone had made the woman an offer she couldn’t refuse.

  Jon wanted to go with her, but the woman wasn’t interested. She said something incomprehensible—to Jon, at least—about how her decision had to do with wanting to live a different sort of life. She told Jon that he knew her too well.

  “You should write that down,” I tell Jon, when he is done.

  “Maybe I will.” He barely pauses. “When do you think the current story is going to come out?”

  “Soon,” I say. I mention that there are two other editors who are reading it, who are perhaps a little less attentive to Jon than I am. I tell Jon I’ll bug them, and that he should bug them, too.

  “OK,” Jon says. Then, “Don’t you have any questions?”

  “Questions?”

  “About the story.”

  “Oh,” I say. “I thought the whole point of this meeting was to come to a consensus about that.”

  “No,” says Jon. “I mean the story I just told you.” He finishes his beer. “Don’t you have any questions about that?”

  I have to think for a minute. “Well,” I say, “do you know what happened to her?”

  “So you assume the story is true.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know if that matters,” Jon says. “But yeah. I’ve been looking for her on Facebook. My sense is she’s been rather successful.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “She was kind of a writer. Maybe half a writer? I don’t know. The one really strange thing about her, aside from the unrecognizability thing, of course, was how much she liked puns. If I’d been thinking about it more clearly I could have seen the end coming.”

  “The lowest form of humor,” I say, skirting Jon’s reference to pain.

  “Obviously I couldn’t take the joke.”

  It’s beginning to get dark and I find myself staring extra hard at the Columbia insignia on the cliff across from us. It stays clear and distinct, even as everything else around us dims to a blue mush. For a while, both Jon and I stop making an effort to speak.

  Then J
on says, “You know there’s a reason I’m telling you this story.”

  “There always is.” I mean it in a nice way.

  Jon is not listening. He says, “It’s a circumstantial reason. It’s because of tennis. I was in the bookstore the other day, browsing for things about your tennis game, you know, as one does, and, I mean, it’s not a thing I would do, read a tennis book, but I was down there in Sports, and I swear, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw something called Bitter Tennis, which is a great title, right?”

  “A fantastic title,” I say.

  “I know. But of course it was a misreading. But this was when, after all these years, I think I understood.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “This was why she had to leave. Everyone was just taking things so psychotically literally!” Jon chuckles. He tugs at the lobe of his right ear.

  I say, “Is this a real person?”

  “Let’s go indoors,” Jon tells me. “I have to check if the match is done.”

  “You remembered that,” I say, as I attempt to hide my mostly empty beer bottle in the pocket of my coat. The bottle protrudes but not, I think, too alarmingly.

  “Remembered what?” Jon is climbing the small hill of the patio.

  For a second I’m confused and don’t know what to say. For a second I genuinely feel as if I don’t know or can’t remember what I’m referring to. The reception area before us is brightly lit, and through the large window I can perceive a huddle of youngish professional men who have arrived to play tennis together. A few of them are wearing white terry-cloth headbands in an un-ironic way. They stand around the sofas, stretching, fiddling with racquet strings and expensive leather attachés.

  But I recover. I sense a sort of infinite laugh rising in me, and instead of laughing I keep talking. I say, “The pun. Bitter Tennis. You remembered.”

  “Memory is funny, too,” says Jon. “Here,” he says, when we are indoors. “Give me your beer,” and he throws the illicit bottle away for me, indicating, unexpectedly, that he understands how uncomfortable I feel.

  I have the impression that all the tennis players in the reception area are staring at us. I want to keep things brief. “It was nice talking,” I tell Jon.

  “Indeed.”

  “I’m just going to use the restroom.”

  “Do you feel like a quick game? I noticed that you’re wearing sneakers. I have extra racquets. We can find your size.”

  “I can’t,” I say. “I have to meet someone for dinner.”

  Jon laughs. He really seems to be in a great mood, in spite of the story. Or maybe it’s the story that’s making him happy, who knows. It clearly means something to him that I’ve come all the way up here.

  “I guess you’re going, then?”

  “I am.”

  “Well, let me know about the story?”

  I think he means the one that he’s already written, and I tell Jon that I will. Jon is a fantastic human. I feel less afraid of the wealthy tennis players and their irony deficiency and go to use the women’s restroom.

  My phone, meanwhile, makes a noise. It’s my friend.

  “It does like that,” he writes.

  A gray thought bubble with an animated ellipsis indicates that he is, wherever he is, continuing to type.

  I silence the phone and take my time urinating. I wash my hands and examine my hair. Everything about me seems reasonable. It’s spring and my freckles are coming out.

  On the way to the subway, I look at my phone again. A new message has appeared.

  “It likes that very much,” my friend confidently opines.

  I switch the sound on but then turn the phone off. I feel weak but satisfied. It has been a good meeting.

  I can remember there was—and this is a true story—one afternoon when, freshly returned from his habitual tennis game and having consumed half a beer, my father threatened to kill me. I was possibly twenty on the day in question and this time he was serious, although I suppose that hardly matters. I used to lock my door whenever I was alone in the house with him. Mentally, I’d call it dehydration. My mother would begin laughing wildly if I tried to recount these sorts of events. “Your father loves you,” she liked to say, but she didn’t need to be out of earshot for my father to begin talking about which random women in the news it was he presently wanted to assault, whose voices were the most whiny, the most beset by vocal fry.

  This is why I moved to the bottom of the ocean. I packed a suitcase long ago. You might think this is a sad thing, but I’ve come to enjoy the incoherent ministrations of the sub-photic beings of the hadal zone, their telescopic eyes and spiny or gelatinous skin. I like the suborder Ceratioidei. I have no idea what they’re saying when their fanged mouths move, but I can always use my phone if I get too hard up for fellowship.

  The other nice thing about my current trench community is that it’s pretty dense. We are, speaking of puns, under a great deal of pressure, but here, and maybe only here, there’s no such thing as tennis.

  Louise Nevelson

  Among my mother’s twenty-three friends on Facebook are my ex-husband and my mother’s former best friend, Max. I am not on speaking terms with either of these individuals and neither, I hope, is my mother. My former husband was living a double life for the last three years of our union and Max, my mother’s former best friend, is dead. Of these unfortunate circumstances my mother and I say exactly nothing. There are one or two people who regularly “like” my mother’s posts. I am not among them.

  Max seems to have been an OK person. My mother met her recently, within the last decade, and there are a total of four details I can recall regarding the life of Max:

  1.Max had an adult son who was a classical musician (I do not recall his instrument)

  2.Max was a woman artist who had a family instead of a career

  3.Max and my mother occasionally communed in nature in Connecticut where both Max and her second husband and my mother and my father, who is my mother’s first husband, have second homes

  4.Max died swiftly of terminal cancer (I do not recall which kind)

  I became aware of the last of these details by way of an art object that appeared in the living room of my parents’ second home. The home has an open floor plan on the second floor and the art object had been given pride of place. It stood on an antique chest (scrolling ribbon work and elaborate lock) at the top of the stairs. Attaining the second floor you met the gaze of the object’s numerous intriguingly drilled orifices, its segmented wooden arm, its awkward pareidolic splendor. The object appeared to be tooting. It was stiffly, silently tooting and motionlessly marching and pointing all over the room. It was a masterwork of late modernism, partaking of a style definitively and exhaustively explored by the artist Louise Nevelson. The art object, which was admittedly all but silently shouting that it recognized and pretty well comprehended that it was a rip-off of a Louise Nevelson, was painted a not entirely unappealing terra-cotta rose. It was a little less than two feet tall. It stood before a window facing south.

  When I first saw this object I carefully indicated to my mother its resemblance to the work of Louise Nevelson. I attempted to proceed with tact. I gingerly inched out of the shadows, choosing my words with care, wanting to know, did my mother suspect that there might be any way Max had been at all familiar?

  “I got that out of her garage,” my mother said. We were going to have dinner in fifteen minutes. The open floor plan meant that views of the kitchen with its steaming pasta pot were available. My father had dropped off to sleep on the sectional.

  Because I still thought this was a joke, this willing selection of an obviously derivative kitsch item, I suggested, “It spoke to you?”

  My mother continued, “After Max died her husband, really sweet guy”—this pronounced with no feeling—“said I could take something. She had a studio.”

  “Oh,” I said, as a veil brushed sleepily across the room. “She’s dead?”

  “Yes,”
my mother said. “Just like Louise Nevelson.”

  There has always been a lot of math going on around me, and lately I am learning more about it. For example, my mother has recently been playing more and more tennis, despite her dislike of the sport. She does so because my father’s tennis game has been growing increasingly weak, due to his age (seventy-seven), and because tennis was my father’s one great love in life. It is unclear, in this sense, whether my mother is somehow acting as a bridge between my father and his one great love, the game of tennis, or if, in a continuation of other questionable behavior on her part, she is quietly robbing him of his most private joy. That my mother has also used my father’s love of tennis as at once a cloak and rationale for her infidelities complicates the story, or, rather, the math, of which, as I have mentioned, there has been a lot.

  Also complicating our math is the fact that my mother, unlike my father, has no great loves. This is the math that the shameful fail to see: Those who feel no shame can also feel no love. They may feel other things, but love is absolutely denied them. This is why shame, not tragic fate, is the other—the double and/or opposite—of luck. Those who are capable of shame are also capable of much else.

  My mother, although shameless, understands this math. This is why she has had to do so very much in order, as she puts it, “to survive.”

  I, meanwhile, am my mother’s large adult child.

  I use this language partly in jest. You will find it on the Internet. People say (i.e., type), “large adult son.” They mean something has gone wrong. They mean that an adult son is still around, lingering for ease of comparison. There is another meme I consider nominally related. The text is something like, “Don’t talk to me or my son ever again.” The idea is schoolyard or mall or parking lot as libidinal zone, the awkwardness of attachment, how it looks like Dad is wearing an invisible apron as he stiffly shields his offspring from some important villain. Once I saw someone caption an image of a large Perrier bottle beside a small Perrier bottle with this text. That was outstanding.