Darwin's Ghosts

by Ariel Dorfman

  And then we dove in and were swimming vigorously, furiously, doing our best to beat the rival, clock the best time, make the team. But it turned out that we were synchronized perfectly, matched as if by some magical hand of God, her left arm and mine swinging like the bending necks of two swans, cupped hands hitting the water at the same lilting instant and our mouths breathing in and out simultaneously, and the next stroke again, and then again, as if there were not two of us but one, one body sharing four arms and four legs, skimming on top of the liquid challenge of the pool, one just as vibrant and tired as the other, unable to gain an inch in our race, unwilling really because it was too wondrous how these parallel lines and lives and torsos converged in one sweet savage rhythm. Unwilling because when she started, for the squish of a second to advance and edge forward, break away, reach the goal sooner, she immediately relinquished her lead, something in the tips of her fingers sighed to her not to outclass me and stay in that mutual, common cadence our lungs had discovered before either of us had ever exchanged a true word, letting our bodies speak for us, already yearning for a different song.

  Not my imagination that she was relenting when she should have pressed her advantage. I did the same thing. When she eased up a bit so our arms could once again dip into the water and surface in harmony, when I managed, thanks to her delicate hesitation, to forge forward, I also surrendered my speed right away so my frame would coincide millimetrically with hers, we both made sure we would arrive at the end of the pool absolutely, completely, amazingly together.

  And amazing was the very word that Coach Griselda used to describe our performance. “Like two peas in a pod,” she enthused. “Two dolphins! Two orcas! Two seals! What a team, what a team, made for each other.”

  Then I looked for the first time at the glory that was Cam Wood and she blinked back at me. We both knew what the coach meant, that we could pace each other, contest each other, bring out the best in our teammate. But dripping with water, glistening my eyes over her face, her smile slipping into mine, we did not need to express with words the deep-sea meaning beneath the surface of that word team, those words made for each other. And we dared to divine that the rest of our lives would be nothing more than the exploration of what our bodies by now knew.

  And this paradise was what that horrible leering image had robbed from me.

  I must have spent the next nine hours wandering around, given that I exhausted almost all the gas in the motorbike. I probably rode along the Charles River back and forth, back and forth, as if caged and trapped between water and land, rather than enjoying the clear blue of the late summer sky, the glorious breeze, a perfect day to play hooky. I had always wanted to visit my favorite nature spots when there was nobody spoiling them, I am sure that I stopped and lulled myself to sleep under those enormous oaks by water that Thoreau had venerated, but what came before is speculation as I have no memory of where I went, what I did, even who I was, losing myself, lost, until I awoke to the murmurs of a nearby stream and looked at my watch and it informed me that it was five o’clock in the afternoon.

  I extracted the photo from my pocket. I rubbed his mug with my fingernail. Nothing. I scratched harder. For one instant, it seemed to fade, then slowly surfaced again, recomposed itself entirely. I used a pen to scrawl a beard on him, a florid moustache, horns, stupid eyebrows. And observed how the puerile cartoonish defacement vanished, his face reemerging as if from a fog.

  I grabbed a stick and punched a hole where his features gloated out at me.

  That did it. He could not fill a void. But of what use was that to me, exterminating my image along with his? Like killing yourself to get rid of cancer or banging your head to stop a headache. Nor would such defilement deter him. The next time somebody snapped a photo of me, he would be back. Unless I cut my own face out, shredded and cut my face into shards. Killed myself.

  Five fifteen.

  Time to head home for whatever reckoning awaited me, my violated face.

  My face?

  Was it still there, could I still see it?

  I looked at myself in the motorbike’s rearview mirror and the very features that the camera had refused to capture stared back at me, unaltered. I turned to the river, crept to the water’s edge until I found a pond among the reeds and searched for my reflection, and again recognized the young man who had awoken to his birthday that very morning, an eternity ago. Something at least to celebrate, that the monster had not infected everything, though I could not know, of course, the pain that glancing at my own face would cause me in the years to come, could not guess that I would spend hours on end staring at my image with mocking, masochistic self-scrutiny in the morning mirror, as if to assure my mind that I had not disappeared, that the curse had not spread, leper-like, to my skin, until finally, one day, I stopped hurting myself, I repudiated looking glasses and replicating ponds, I would no longer squint out of a window when it grew dark outside for fear of being reminded yet once more of what I had lost, one day I drastically decided to avoid the horror of watching my face grow older, the changes that no camera or video or film registered once the plague took up residence in my skin.

  Did I have any hope as I sped home that evening? Did I expect that maybe something miraculous would happen once I was under the protective wings of my family?

  Skulking outside the door, I could hear a full-blown war of words, angry arguments cascading to and fro. Of course, as soon as I entered the living room, silence possessed the antagonists—my father cool and cutting, my mother flushed and spilling over with anxiety, while my two brothers watched from the sofa, transfixed as if they were onlookers at a wrestling match. That major scuffle had probably been fermenting since my departure, probably my father had called in sick, not caring that he had to put the finishing touches on the new Danny Kaye commercial, my mother must have phoned her book club pals that she could not meet them, neither of them even realizing that Hugh and Vic had missed school.

  There were forced smiles all around and an extra-special bear hug from Mom, everything as it should have been on the eldest son’s birthday, except for the question my father directed to me: Did you show it to anybody?, and my lie just as quick: Of course not. And his retort: Good. Let’s start then. Soonest is better.

  That’s when I saw, piled up in a corner, twelve cameras, the seven that belonged to my dad, plus the four different versions of the Polaroid SX-70 delivered on separate and solemn occasions to my mother, my brothers, and me, as well as one old piece of German equipment that Mom had inherited from who knows what ancestor and that nobody had ever figured out how to use, that’s how old it was.

  There followed the first of what was to be an endless array of photographic sessions in the years to come. Starting, that night, with all the Polaroid devices, which spewed out the same primitive countenance pasted onto mine. No matter the distance between me and the lens, no matter who else was in or out of range, no matter how much light or shadow was cast upon me, the result was invariably the same. And the more those visual testimonials of the travesty piled up, the paler my father grew, the more red and embarrassed my mother, the more withdrawn my brothers.

  When that phase was done, the ceremony was repeated with each of my father’s machines that had not been manufactured by Polaroid. He loved cameras of all sorts, even the ones the Kodak rivals had released, and other brands as well, and he had fully loaded each one and now proceeded to shoot me all over again, family group, then by myself, then in a chair, then lying down, finally a close-up, and then all over again with the lights down, and with sunglasses that, he liked to remind us, came straight from the genius of Dr. Edwin Land and Polaroid Research and Development, and even dressed me up with the goggles Grandpa Bert had brought back from the war, hundreds of frames, the full pictorial pursuit carried out with not a sound in the room except the faint clack of shutter and button and my dad clearing his throat after each take.

  Once it was over, he nodded, and finally spoke: “I’ll be back soonest.
” He loved that word, soonest, expected the world to quicken at his command or persuasiveness, always in a hurry, my dad, always so sure of himself, always scripting everything.

  We knew where he was going, with that bag brimming over with cameras and film, and could calculate how long it would take him to drive from our Waltham home to the Polaroid building on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, stealthily creep into it without being disturbed, descend into the bowels of the lab and develop the many rolls of film, I could imagine him scrutinizing each photo and then stuffing each one in the bag along with the cameras and returning to the darkened living room where we all awaited him on tenterhooks, my hand in my mom’s, our hearts beating as if one.

  He tried putting a good face, so to speak, on the disaster that was befalling the tribe, as he liked to call it.

  “It’s every photo from every camera,” he said when he returned. “All brands are equally liable! Look, look, look!” If I repressed my resentment at such glee it was because I was aware how much it mattered that the blame for my savage’s malevolent raid be shared by other companies, saving both Edwin Land’s photographic empire and Dad’s income. Though as we looked, per his instructions, at the hundreds of photos where that young, primitive alien subjugated me, as our dismay grew, so did Dad’s, his realization that Polaroid would not easily escape a barrage of bad publicity, far from it.

  And here is where the quarrel I had interrupted came back full blast. Now that it was clear that a plague—my mother was the first to use that word, my father avoided it, preferring the less medical term catastrophe—had indeed mortified our family, the question was what to do with me.

  Mom wanted to raise the alarm. She didn’t quite manage to recommend calling out the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Coast Guard, but that was the caliber of intervention she was demanding. Our doctor, for starters, to see if he could discover the causes of this sickness. He’d know if anyone else was infested. Though better perhaps the ER, the police, lawyers, the Boy Scouts—and also uncles and aunts, her mother, my father’s parents, ever more hysterical as she added names and professions and contacts, my teachers, they would know if any students had reported in sick, the school principal, everybody, anybody who might shed some light on Fitzroy’s ailment, and then there were the neighbors and the PTA so parents could quarantine their children. And the media, she said resolutely, the public had the right to be on the lookout and collaborate in a campaign to—

  And that’s when my dad cut the torrent off. Precisely now was when prudence and caution were needed. To panic could bring irreparable harm to Roy. Did she realize what it meant if this shameful episode was revealed to the ravenous media, whose hunger for scandal he knew all too well—he was paid, after all, to feed it selectively, make sure Polaroid’s image remained intact and unblemished.

  We knew, he said, the delicate position that the company was in. He didn’t need to elaborate. We had all lived through the traumatic Polavision fiasco of the last years: many millions invested to develop a soundless instant film had almost bankrupted the company, leading to Dr. Edwin Land’s resignation as CEO, unsettling the company’s stock and status. And this “creature from hell”—my father’s exact words—could not have picked a more perverse moment to infest me, precisely when next month’s upcoming patent trial against Eastman Kodak guaranteed a media frenzy. Reporters, searching for rumors to juice up the story, wouldn’t care if other cameras, non-instant photographic systems displayed the same horrible effects. The first manifestation of this fiendish child molester had coiled out of an SX-70, choosing the son of Polaroid’s marketing vice president, sullying the cheerful image of families basking in American bliss that he had strived to create. The company could not survive such a blow.

  Mom was about to reply, when I piped up.

  “What about me?”

  I wasn’t surprised that my dad’s priority was Polaroid. His loyalty to Dr. Land’s legacy could be traced back to his own father: “I wouldn’t exist, you boys wouldn’t exist, if it hadn’t been for Edwin Land and his invention of wartime darkness goggles.” Grandpa Bert had started working in the Land laboratory in 1940 and claimed that his life had been saved by the use, five years later, in the war zone of France, of the same eye equipment he had helped design. To give the story a twist of drama and romance, my dad’s dad would add that it was through that very device that he had first espied his future wife, Berénice Briant, gazing in wonder at the night sky aglow with rockets and blazing bombs, and that he had rushed to her, thrown her down on the rich soil of France. And, of course, both he and she had taken their time in raising themselves up, the noise and the havoc a perfect pretext for the process of mutual exploration that would lead, nine months later, to the birth of my father, in the States, as by then Bert had been sent back with shrapnel in his knee—and a young Parisian bride. His only regret: that he had not liberated the concentration camps, having promised Dr. Land that he would kick kraut ass and free whatever Jew he found imprisoned by the Nazis. Instead he was limited to looking at those photos of emaciated humans. Not that Land ever reproached him with dereliction of duty. He accepted Bert Foster back into the Polaroid family—showed him the old draughtsman’s desk that awaited his skills along with his old salary. And then, decades later, welcomed Bert’s son into the fold as well. Though Jerry Foster was too proud to use his father’s credentials to secure a job at the company. This he did on his own, sidling up to Dr. Land as he was leaving a shareholder meeting (our family had shares in the company, of course) and whispering into his ear: “We had fun inventing it. Now it’s your turn.” Land only grasped what this meant—he was never any good at marketing—when my father elaborated: “It’s your new slogan, sir, for the next model.” Land hired him on the spot—just out of Harvard Business School though he might be—and had nurtured him carefully over the years. More so when he discovered that he was the product of Bert’s loins and Polaroid goggles.

  And also took a liking to me at the age of eleven when my father, without the slightest hint of the irony in the words he was choosing, introduced me to the great genius as the boy who’s being groomed to follow in his forefathers’ footsteps. Dr. Land had responded by musing to himself, steps, yes, steps—and then, so tell me, lad, are you ready to create the impossible, are you ready, Fitzroy Foster, to take five thousand steps before you reach it? He must have appreciated my response, as many steps as required, sir, because the next day he sent me, written in his own hand, some lines about those five thousand steps—neither of us guessing that there would be a day when his advice would come in handy.

  So my “What about me?” was not judgmental, merely inquisitive. However much I had been trained to privilege the company over my own desires, I still had the right to know what was in store for me.

  Like any superb marketing executive, my father had answers to everything.

  “You, Roy? This is all about protecting you. Even a whisper about this illness and you’ll be sequestered by the government, picked apart by bureaucrats and researchers and medical personnel, displayed like a freak till the end of your days. My Lord, they might even confine the whole family for who knows how long. Your mother and I only have your best interests at heart. Tell him, Margaretta!”

  “So, according to you,” she said, “what happens next?” The calmness in her voice indicated that she seemed ready to defer to him—for now, at least.

  “First, we need to investigate this—this phenomenon. Unobtrusively. Test every piece of photographic equipment out there—and film, of course, Super-8, the works. Polaroid has models of each and every camera. We can sneak in after hours.”

  “Isn’t it careless not to warn anyone else?” Mom insisted.

  “If any other child or adult is afflicted, we’ll know soon enough—”

  “Not if everyone decides to keep quiet like us.”

  “And we’ll need to ferret out from both sides of the family,” Dad continued, ignoring Mom’s objection, “if anyone’s heard of any
anomaly that involves taking pictures.”

  “The pictures. What do we do with the pictures?”

  “Destroy them, burn the fuckers, every last one. No incriminating evidence. We can’t risk letting Kodak get ahold of even one sample. Nobody’s ever going to say that our family was responsible for the downfall of the Polaroid empire.”

  I wondered if his craving for an auto-da-fé might derive from something more than a tactic to shelter the company. Could this supernatural, inexplicable portent have delivered my habitually, excruciatingly rational, ultra-scientific progenitor into the grip of superstition? Did my father really believe that reducing the miscreant to ashes would rid us of his crimes and sins?

  Anyway, Mom wasn’t about to reenact the Inquisition in our own home. Now it was her turn to be adamant: she intended to collect every item, every photo, make an archive, day by day and hour by hour, document the whole infestation, just as she had kept the school reports in a box, vaccination certificates, medical history of her three boys, just as she had measured height and weight, all, all of it there, a sort of family anti-album, so that when Fitzroy was cured she would be able to point to the origin of the sickness, the stages of its progress and ultimate rout and defeat. And that day—

  And Dad began shaking his head violently, that day what?, pass this on to the press, be accused of having hidden something so explosive and dangerous?—and I could see where this was heading and decided to leave them to it, and climbed the stairs to my room.