We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  “It’s nothing,” his father said. “It’s that you’re here. I want everything to be perfect.”

  They walked through the campus, passing people his father knew. His father introduced him quickly, barely stopping to do so, even though the people sported those deliberate expressions of instant delight that all people, however curmudgeonly, were required to produce upon meeting the progeny of their colleagues. He was walking so fast that Connell had a hard time keeping up with him, and eventually he broke into a little trot, which prevented Connell from taking in the sights as he would have liked. It looked like one of those fancy campuses in movies, with buildings with august columns and stonework, not like a place for people hanging on by a hair.

  “This is nice,” Connell said.

  “This campus was designed by a famous architect named Stanford White,” his father said automatically. “At one time, it was the Bronx satellite of New York University.” His voice sounded distant, as though he were delivering a lecture. “When NYU built this campus, their chancellor said he wanted it to look like the American ideal of a college. In the early seventies, after it had gotten too expensive to maintain, NYU sold it to the State of New York, and we moved over here from the old Bronx High School of Science.”

  “Dad,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Are we late?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are we running?”

  Something in his voice must have given his father pause, because his father stopped and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “This isn’t how I would have wanted this to go,” he said. “Believe me. There’s a lot here I wanted to show you. There’s a beautiful overlook point called . . .” He rubbed his nose. “The Hall of Fame for Great Americans,” he said after a few seconds. “You can see for miles up there. It has a lot of statues arranged in a circle around you. Maybe if everything goes well I can take you there after class.”

  They arrived at the building, but instead of marching directly into the lecture hall to a throng of expectant students, as his father’s pace suggested they might have to do, they headed to his lab, where he closed the door behind him. His father told him to absorb himself in whatever he might find interesting, so long as he didn’t break anything. He waved at a human skeleton suspended in the corner, a row of rat cages along the far wall, and a lonely assemblage of beakers and petri dishes. Then he took out his legal pad and paced back and forth, quietly reading aloud.

  Connell left the beakers huddled in their fragile little gathering. He avoided the accusing eyes of the rats and hurried past the hollow ones of the skeleton. Finding nothing more promising, he circled back to tap on the glass of the rat cages and listen to what his father was reading.

  “You can feed them if you want,” his father said, gesturing to the rats, which almost seemed to listen along over his shoulder. “There’s a bag of pellets in the drawer behind you.”

  “I’m okay,” Connell said.

  “I’m trying to focus,” his father said, “and it would help if I didn’t have to worry about you listening to every word.”

  His father searched around. “Here, take this,” he said, tossing him an issue of Scientific American. Connell didn’t like that magazine; they had a lot of them at home. His father was always drawing his attention to articles on black holes or glaciers or acid rain, but Connell stuck to Sports Illustrated and the “People” page in the back of Time.

  “Why don’t you sit outside and I’ll come get you when I’m done?”

  Connell wanted to tell him he didn’t have to come to his stupid class at all if he wanted him gone that badly, but he held back. He did have to write the report. But something else told him not to make a big deal of it. “I’ll just go to the class and wait for you,” he said.

  “Great,” his father said, visibly relieved. “Two flights up. Room four forty-three. Introduce yourself.”

  As Connell left, his father was splashing water on his face in one of the sinks at the end of the long tables.

  He took the stairs three at a time. The classroom door was open; he walked past it as casually as he could. The room was more full than he’d expected. How was he supposed to introduce himself to a room full of college students? He could barely get up in front of kids his own age without worrying about his voice betraying him with squeaks and squawks.

  He mimed absorption in a bulletin board, then doubled back, passing the room again. The floor sloped upward from the front, so that the people at the back stared down from a lofty perch. A box on the wall taunted him: In Case of Emergency, Break Glass. The words took on a sudden poignancy; he would’ve been helpless even with an axe in his hand. He was beginning to see the wisdom in his father’s having prepared a speech.

  He stepped into the room and hustled to one of the empty seats in the back. He waited for the thumping in his chest to subside. They could figure out who he was for themselves if they cared so much.

  When his father walked in, he didn’t look up but headed for the podium and started reading from his pad.

  “Today we are going to begin our discussion of the central nervous system,” he said. “I have quite a bit of material to cover, and it is crucial that you assimilate this material for the final exam, so I would ask you to take careful notes, because I will not be able to repeat myself or interrupt the lecture to answer questions. Should you happen to find yourself confused at any point, please write your questions on a sheet of paper to hand to me at the end of class, and I will provide you with a written response when we meet on Thursday. Additionally, I am sorry to report that, due to the demands of a long-term research project, I will be forced to cancel office hours for the remainder of the semester.”

  The room erupted in incredulous groans. His father didn’t look up but only held his finger on the page and waited for the furor to die down.

  “At the end of each remaining class session, I will collect your questions. After I do so, I will pass out the detailed responses I have written to your earlier questions. Writing these responses will come at the expense of a considerable amount of my time, so I hope you will rest assured that any lost office hours will be more than adequately compensated for in this fashion. If on occasion I appear sluggish or distracted, or seem to need a second to compose myself, be aware that I am likely exhausted from the busy schedule I am keeping.

  “One other point of note. Beginning today, I will be reading exclusively from prepared lectures and leave off answering or posing questions. In recent class sessions, we have covered comparatively less material than we did in the earlier part of the course, as you are all no doubt aware.”

  There were murmurs of acknowledgment, though his father didn’t stop to notice them.

  “I ask your forgiveness for the relatively inert nature of my presentation of the material from now on, but I assure you that a certain briskness is vital to your being adequately prepared for the final examination. And so, without further ado, I would like to begin.”

  When his father walked in, an indignant chatter had percolated throughout the room. At the beginning of his speech, a few students scanned the room for the reactions of others, but now several who didn’t have notebooks out before took them out, and many pens were poised over pages.

  He began.

  “The central nervous system,” he said, “represents the largest part of the nervous system. It consists of the brain and the spinal cord. Along with the peripheral nervous system, which we will learn about later, the central nervous system plays an essential role in the control of behavior.”

  All around Connell, people were writing down everything he said.

  “The central nervous system is contained within an area known as the dorsal cavity, which can be broken down into two subcavities, the cranial and the spinal. The cranial cavity contains the brain, while the spinal cavity contains the spinal cord.”

  A few hands went up; it was evidently a hard habit to break immediately. If his father saw them out of
the corner of his eye, he didn’t give any indication. He flipped pages in his pad as he read.

  “The central nervous system is protected by an elegant, two-tiered system. First, both the brain and the spinal cord are enveloped in a sheath of membranes known as the meninges. The meninges are three continuous sheets of connective tissue. From the outside in, these sheets are known as the dura mater, the arachnoid mater, and the pia mater.”

  The students seemed confused. Most had stopped writing. They were looking at each other and adding their hands to the gathering chorus in the air.

  “The second tier of protection of the central nervous system is provided by bone. The brain is protected by the skull, while the spinal cord is protected by the vertebrae.”

  Now most of the class had its hands raised. His father had said he didn’t want questions, but Connell was sure that if he knew how many hands were up, he would want to clear up the point so everyone could move along.

  “The brain receives sensory input from the spinal cord as well as from its own nerves—which we will name and discuss later. It dedicates most of its capacity to processing sensory inputs and instigating motor outputs.”

  He had to think of something. His father obviously couldn’t hear the grumbling that had overtaken the class. He was in some kind of zone. No one was taking notes anymore. Connell didn’t want to anger him, but he knew his father would thank him later if he helped him solve this problem now.

  His fingers tingled as he stood and felt everyone turn to face him. All he wanted to do was get his father to look up from the page. He cleared his throat.

  “Dad!” he said sharply.

  His father must not have heard him, or if he did, he must not have understood the seriousness of the situation. Connell wanted to sit back down, but now he couldn’t. He felt short of breath.

  “The spinal cord serves three main functions,” his father went on. “It conducts sensory information from the peripheral nervous system to the brain. It conducts motor information from the brain to various effectors. And it serves as a minor reflex center.”

  “Dad!” he said again, this time more emphatically. “Dad!”

  His father looked right at him. It felt as if they were the only two people in the room. All the hands in the air fell at once. His father looked around at the faces staring back at him. Everyone seemed to wait to see what would happen next. His father bent over the pad again. As he did so, hands shot up all over the room. Voices called out.

  “Professor Leary!”

  “Professor!”

  But he didn’t hear them. “The second tier of protection of the central nervous system,” he said, to a round of groans, “is provided by bone.” One man hopped in his seat, as if he were about to run up and tackle him away from the lectern.

  “The brain is protected by the skull . . .”

  Connell knew he had heard this already.

  “What is this shit?” the hopping man asked.

  “Hello!” shouted a lady a few rows up. “You can’t just ignore us here.”

  Connell had seen his father determined before. When he wanted to do something, when he really wanted to do it, he put his head down and got it done.

  A growing outcry was filling the room, so that you could barely hear him reading.

  “Dad!” Connell shouted. “Dad!”

  His father stopped again. This time he backed away from the pad and the lectern. Connell saw the pages he’d folded under the bottom flip back onto the pad. His father looked at him again in that uncanny way, as if Connell was the only other person there. He backed up to his briefcase and squeezed the handle as though to keep it away from someone trying to snatch it from him. Then he seemed to recover a bit and approached the podium again. Connell sat down.

  “Today we are going to begin our discussion of the central nervous system,” he said. He stopped talking and looked around at the room. They were eerily quiet. Connell was desperate for someone to say something. He knew he couldn’t do it himself.

  After a few seconds, his father gestured to a woman in the front who had been taking notes through the chaos.

  “Karen,” he said. “Karen? Is that right?”

  “Yes, Professor Leary.”

  “Karen, if you don’t mind, would you tell me where I left off?”

  “You had just finished telling us that the spinal cord serves as a minor reflex center.”

  “Okay,” he said. “That’s good. That’s good. Thank you. That’s exactly what I needed. The spinal cord as a reflex center.”

  He flipped through the pad furiously. When he had gone through all the pages, he flipped back through them again so hard that it looked like he might rip them off.

  “You see,” he said. “I’m tired. I’ve been working hard. And there’s a lot on my mind. In fact, there’s something specific on my mind that’s distracting me, and I hope you’ll forgive me for letting it get in the way today. If you’ll all turn and look, you’ll see my son at the back of the room.”

  Connell could feel the blood rush to his cheeks.

  “My son came along with me, as you can see,” his father said. “Today is an important day for him.” His father was looking directly at him. “Isn’t it, son?”

  He was going to make him talk about the project.

  “Yes,” Connell said.

  “Today’s his birthday,” his father said.

  Everyone was staring at him. It had been almost a month since his birthday. He could see it all: the metal bat, the batting gloves, the high-end tee, the netting, the boxes of balls, the bucket to keep them in; heading out into the cold and the whipping wind after dinner and setting up at the back of the driveway; under the moon, in the quiet of the evening, slamming balls into the net and delighting in the ping produced by a ball squarely struck.

  The faces smiled. He heard a volley of clucking. One lady near him asked him how old he was.

  “I’m fourteen,” he said.

  “Fourteen today,” his father said. “And he’s been such a good kid, waiting for me. You see, we’re going to the Mets game right after this class. Opening Day. And I’ve had that in the back of my mind. I’ve been worried about the traffic. We’re going to be cutting it a little close. So I apologize for not being all here today. Really, if I’m being honest with myself, I should ask you all if you wouldn’t mind if we just ended class early and made up for it next week. I realize some of you have come from far away. Would you forgive me if we canceled today’s class and made it up next time?”

  The students looked around at each other. Some grumbled; one man slapped his desk in frustration, yelled “Bullshit!” and walked out. Others shrugged.

  “Good. Good. That’s great,” his father said. “Then we’ll end class now.”

  They started packing up their stuff. “I’ll draw up a handout explaining in depth what I was going to go through today, and I’ll spend a little time at the beginning of next class taking you through it point by point.” He picked up the briefcase from the floor and began gathering his things. “Thank you all,” he said, over the rustle of bags and jackets. “This is kind of you. I apologize for imposing on your time like this.”

  Some of them wished Connell a happy birthday as they left. His father waved them out the door. Connell remained seated until everyone had gone. He walked up to the front of the room. His father stood facing the blackboard, his hands on the chalkwell. Connell could see his shoulders rising and falling.

  “I have to pee,” Connell said, though he didn’t really have to.

  In the bathroom, he looked in the mirror. He lifted his shirt up, then took it off and flexed with both arms. There was more mass and definition. He brought his fists to his ears and squeezed his muscles like Hulk Hogan. He smiled a big, crazy smile with lots of teeth. He drew close to the mirror, leaned his forehead against it. His breath collected on it and evaporated. He slapped at the little bit of baby fat still on his stomach, hard enough to leave a red mark.

  “Go aw
ay,” he said. “Go away!” Then he started to worry that someone would walk in on him.

  He put his shirt on and went back out. They walked to the car in silence.

  “I don’t have tickets to the game,” his father said after they’d been driving awhile. “We can still go. We can try to get in.”

  “We don’t have to.”

  “It might be hard to get tickets.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was thinking we could go watch some planes.”

  Connell turned the radio on and the volume up a few clicks. He watched his father’s face for flickers of anger, but his father didn’t seem to notice the change in volume. Connell turned it up even more. His father’s hand shot to the knob.

  “That’s too loud,” he said. “Not too loud.”

  It was lower now than it had been before he raised it the first time, but he didn’t want to chance it. He looked out the window.

  “Hey, Dad?”

  “What?”

  “What was all that about?”

  “I just didn’t feel like teaching today.”

  “Why did you say it was my birthday?”

  He could see his father’s face reddening, his hands gripping the wheel tighter.

  “Don’t you think I know my own son’s birthday? It’s March thirteenth!” His father took a deep breath. “I just wanted everything to go perfectly. I wanted you to have good material for your project.”

  “You seemed confused.”

  “I was fine!” he shouted. “That’s the end of it! I wanted things to go well while you were there. I’ve never had you in the classroom with me before. End of discussion!”

  The pitch in his voice rose along with the volume, and his words became a kind of shrieking. Then he stopped and his breathing settled down.

  “I didn’t want to be cooped up inside today,” he said.

  They drove in silence.