It is such a pleasure to pick up a book and hold it. I will never get used to reading something off a screen. I gathered together an assortment of texts and went back to the reading area, rectangular vinyl couches around a square table. Other people had been there recently; there were greasy paper bags, and a bedroll, and a gallon jug of water. The tiled floor was marred with ashes and charred sticks, and the skylight was dark with soot. But I had proprietary instincts, and would not be deterred. I put down my leather satchel and laid the books down in a pile, squared the edges, and with my flashlight in my hand I played a game I hadn’t played in years, since the last time I was in that library.
The game was called “trajectories,” my personal version of the I Ching. I would choose at random various sentences and paragraphs, hoping to combine them into a kind of narrative, or else whittle them into an arrow of language that might point into the future. For luck I took Cousin Theo’s velvet pouch out of my pocket, ran my thumb along the worn places. I did not dare unbutton it, thinking, as usual, that whatever had once been inside of it had probably dried up and disappeared. The pouch, I imagined, was as empty as Pandora’s box or even emptier. How big was a caul, anyway? How long did it take for it to crumble into dust?
I set to work. Here was my first point of reference, from my uncle Bob (Robert W. Jr.) Claiborne’s book on human evolution, God or Beast (Norton, 1974), page 77:
. . . To begin with, then, in that the women to whom I have been closest during my lifetime have all of them been bright, intellectually curious, and independent-minded. My mother was involved in the women’s rights movement before World War I, and until her retirement worked at administrative jobs; at this writing she is, at eighty-six, still actively interested in people, ideas, and public affairs. My sister is a college teacher and author. . . .
Given this sort of background, it will probably not surprise the reader much to learn that for most of my life I have preferred the company of women—interesting ones—to that of men. Not just some of my best friends but nearly all of them have been women. Evolution and genetics aside, then, I obviously find women distinctly different from men—and so far as I am concerned, vive la difference!
And on page 84:
Thus it seems to me very probable that human males possess a built-in tolerance for infants and young children, as well as a built-in interest in them and capacity to become emotionally involved with them—a conclusion that seems wholly consistent with what we know about human societies. I would also suspect that, like both baboon and chimp males, the human male has a less powerful tendency to become involved with the young than does the female. I can’t prove this, and indeed am not certain that it can ever be either proved or disproved. Nonetheless, it seems to me at least arguable that the emotional rewards of fatherhood are somewhat less than those of motherhood. Be that as it may, however, the rewards exist and I, for one, would hate to have forgone them.
In these passages I could see in my uncle a wistful combination of pedantry and 1960s masculinity. As I read, I remembered him telling me about a trip to visit his father in the Virgin Islands when he was a teenager. He had found him living with an alumnus of the music school, a boy also named Robert, whom he had already passed off to the neighbors as his son, Robert Jr. Loud and gleeful, sitting on his leather sofa in the West Tenth Street apartment, my uncle had described the farcical misunderstandings and logistical contortions that had accompanied his stay.
But what about this, a few more pages on? Here in the flashlight’s small tight circle, when I brought it close:
The point bears repetition, because it is important, and because no one else is willing to make it (I’ve checked.) . . .
I thought this was a promising place to start, and so I laid the book down, picked up another at random. It was The Grand Contraption, a book about comparative cosmologies that my father—the husband, as it happens, of the “college teacher and author” mentioned above—published in 2005. Here’s what he had to say to me, on page 142:
. . . Once more the merchant looked around him. Far away on the road someone walked toward the hill, but there was still time. A little smoke still came out of the eastern pot. There was no sound but he went on, softly reciting Our Father. He crossed himself, stepped into the center of the triangle, filled his lungs, and bellowed into the quiet air, “Make the chair ready!”
But it is time for us to leave the demons alone. Even if supernatural beings are an important part of many people’s vision of the world, they belong to a different order of nature and should be allowed some privacy.
I didn’t think so. Looking up momentarily, glancing down the long dark layers of books, reflecting briefly on the diminished condition of the world, it didn’t occur to me that privacy was in short supply. It didn’t occur to me that it had any value whatsoever, since a different order of nature was what I was desperate to reveal.
But I was used to these feelings of ambivalence. Leafing forward through the book, I remembered how studiously my father had competed with his own children. After my sister started publishing her own histories of science, he switched from physics to a version of the same field, claiming it was the easier discipline, and therefore suitable to his waning powers. Princeton University Press had been her publisher before it was his. And after I had started selling science fiction stories in the 1980s, he wrote a few himself. He sent them off to the same magazines, claiming that he wanted to start out easy, just like me. Though unprintable, all his stories shared an interesting trait—they started out almost aggressively conventional, before taking an unexpected science-fiction turn. At the time I’d wondered if he was trying to mimic aspects of my style. If so, could it be true that he had found no emotional rewards in fatherhood?
Disappointed by this line of thought, I glanced down at the book again, where my thumb had caught. The beam of the flashlight, a red rim around a yellow core, captured these words: “The point bears repetition.”
That was enough. I closed The Grand Contraption with a bang that reverberated through the library. Apprehensive, I shined the light back toward the stairway, listening for an answering noise.
After a moment, to reassure myself, I opened a novel written by my father’s mother, Edwin Avery Park’s first wife. It was called Walls Against the Wind, and had been published by Houghton Mifflin. On the strength of the advance, my grandmother had taken my father on a bicycle tour through Western Ireland in 1935. This, from the last pages:
‘I’m going to Moscow,’ Miranda told him. ‘They have another beauty and a different God—’ The tones of her voice were cool as spring rain. ‘It’s what I have to do. It’s all arranged.’
‘Yes . . . I wish you’d understand.’
‘I’m going almost immediately. I’m going to work there and be part of it.’ Her voice came hard and clipped like someone speaking into a long-distance telephone. ‘Will you come to Russia with me?’ she challenged her brother. ‘Will you do that?’
Adrian flung back his head, unexpectedly meeting her challenge. His eyes were blue coals in the white fire of his face.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll go with you.’
She wanted them to go to Russia. It was the only thing she wanted to do. There was a fine clean world for them there, with hard work and cold winters. It was the kind of world she could dig into and feel at home in. She did not want to live in softness with Adrian. Only in the clean cold could the ripe fruit of his youth keep firm and fresh. She gave him her hand across the table. Perhaps it would work out—some way. Russia. In Russia, she thought, anything can happen. . . .
Anything could happen. Of course not much information had come out of Russia for a long time, not even the kind of disinformation that might have convinced a cultivated Greenwich Village bohemienne like my grandmother that Russia might be a bracing place to relocate in the 1930s. Now, of course, in Moscow there wasn’t even Second Life.
But maybe my thinking was too literal. Parts of what had been Quebec, I k
new from various websites, were experimenting with a new form of socialism. Maybe, I thought, my impersonation of a Canadian in New York City long before had constituted some kind of preparation, or at least some caul-induced clairvoyance. Maybe my grandmother’s text was telling me to move up there, to escape my responsibilities or else bring them with me to attempt something new. Or if that was impossible, maybe I was to reorganize my own life along socialistic or even communistic lines, clear away what was unneeded, especially this bourgeois obsession with dead objects and the dead past. The world would have a future, after all, and I could choose to share it or else not.
And of course all this frivolous thinking was meant to hide a disturbing coincidence. Adrian was my son’s name. Furthermore, my wife had miscarried a few years before he was born, a girl we were intending to name Miranda. But I don’t think, in my previous trajectories, I had ever glanced at this particular book. The library contained several other romances by Frances Park.
Was I to think that if Miranda had lived, she would have been able to reach her brother as I and his mother had not, break him out of his isolation? Briefly, idly, I wondered if, Abigail now dead in some unfortunate civil disturbance, I could swoop down on Richmond like Ulysses S. Grant. . . .
After a few moments, I tightened my flashlight’s beam. What did I possess so far? A deluded vision of a fine clean world, with hard work and cold winters. Demons, rapid transformations, and the diluted pleasures of fatherhood. Almost against my will, a pattern was beginning to materialize.
But now I turned to something else, a Zone book from 2006 called Secrets of Women, page 60:
. . . In addition to these concerns about evidence, authenticity, and female corporeality, a second factor helps explain why anatomies were performed principally or exclusively on holy women: the perceived similarities between the production of internal relics and the female physiology of conception. Women, after all, generated other bodies inside their own. God’s presence in the heart might be imagined as becoming pregnant with Christ.
It was true that I had many concerns about evidence, authenticity, and female corporeality, although it had not occurred to me until that moment to wonder why anatomies had been performed (either principally or exclusively) on holy women. These words had been written by my sister, Katy Park, who had been a history professor at Harvard University.
She had left Boston in 2019, when the city was attacked, but up until her death she was still working in Second Life. Her lectures were so popular, she used to give them in the open air, surrounded by hundreds of students and non-students. For a course in utopias, she had created painstaking reproductions of Plato’s Republic, Erewhon, Islandia, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Orange County. Or once I’d seen her give a private seminar in Andreas Veselius’s surgical amphitheater, while he performed an autopsy down below.
She had not had children. But her words could not but remind me of my ex-wife’s pregnancy, and how miraculous that had seemed. Anxious, I took the laptop from my satchel and tried to contact Nicola in Richmond, but everything was down. Or almost everything—there was information available on almost any year but this one.
So maybe it wasn’t even true, that I could choose to share in the world’s future. It wasn’t a matter of simple nostalgia: For a long time, for many people and certainly for me, the past had taken the future’s place, as any hope or sense of forward progress had dried up and disappeared. But now, as I aged, more and more the past had taken over the present also, because the past was all we had. Everywhere, it was the past or nothing. In Second Life, frustrated, I pulled up some of the daily reconstructions of the siege of 1864-65—why not? I could see the day when my New Orleans great-great-grandmother, Clara Justine Lockett, crossed the line with food and blankets for her brother, who was serving with the Washington Artillery. Crossing back, she’d been taken for a spy, and had died of consumption while awaiting trial.
Or during the previous July, I could see at a glance that during the Battle of the Crater, inexplicably, unforgivably, General Burnsides had waited more than an hour after the explosion to advance, allowing the Confederates to re-form their ranks. If he had attacked immediately, before dawn, he might have ended the war that day.
Exasperated by his failure, I logged off. I picked up a book my mother had written about my younger sister, published in 1967 when she was nine years old. As if to reassure myself, I searched out a few lines from the introduction where my mother introduced the rest of the family under a selection of aliases. Katy was called Sara. Rachel was called Becky. I was called Matthew:
If I were to describe them this would be the place to do it. Their separate characteristics. The weaknesses and strengths of each one of them, are part of Elly’s story. But it is a part that must remain incomplete, even at the risk of unreality. Our children have put up with a lot of things because of Elly; they will not have to put up with their mother’s summation of their personalities printed in a book . . .
This seemed fair and just to me, though it meant we scarcely appeared or existed in our own history. I wouldn’t make the same mistake; finding nothing more of interest, I laid the book aside. Instead I picked up its sequel, Exiting Nirvana (Little, Brown, 2001, in case you want to check).
In that book, Elly has disappeared, and Jessy has resumed her real name. Autism is already so common, there is no longer any fear of embarrassment. But when I was young, Jessy was an anomaly. The figure I grew up with was one child out of 15,000—hard to believe now, when in some areas, if you believe the blogs, the rates approach twenty percent. Spectrum kids, they call them. In the 1960s the causes were thought to be an intolerable and unloving family. Larger environmental or genetic tendencies were ignored. But toward the end of her life, my mother resembled my sister more and more, until finally in their speech patterns, their behavior, their obsessions, even their looks, they were virtually identical.
Now I examined the pictures. My autistic sister, like her grandfather, had not excelled in portraiture. Her frail grasp of other people’s feelings did not allow her to render faces or gestures or expressions. But unlike him, for a while she had enjoyed a thriving career, because her various disabilities were explicit in her work, rather than (as is true for the rest of us, as is true, for example, right now) its muddled subtext. For a short time before her death she was famous for her meticulous acrylic paintings of private houses, or bridges, or public buildings—the prismatic colors, the night skies full of constellations and atmospheric anomalies. When I lived in Baltimore, I had commissioned one for a colleague. Here it was, printed in color in the middle of the book: “The House on Abell Avenue.”
I looked at the reproduction of Jessy’s painting—one of her best—and tried to imagine the end of my trajectory, the house of a woman I used to know. I tried to imagine a sense of forward progress, but in this I was hindered by another aspect of the game, the way it threw you back into the past, the way it allowed you to see genetic and even stylistic traits in families. Shared interests, shared compulsions, a pattern curling backward, a reverse projection, depressing for that reason. This was the shadow portion of the game, which wouldn’t function without it, obviously. But even the first time I had stumbled on these shelves, I had been careful not to look at my own books, or bring them to the table, or even think about them in this context. There had been more future then, not as much past.
I was not yet done. There were some other texts to be examined, the only one not published by a member of my family, or published at all. But I had collected in a manila envelope some essays on the subject of A Princess of Roumania, forwarded to me by Professor Rosenheim after my appearance in his class. To these I had added the letters I’d received from the girl I called Andromeda, not because that was her name, but because it was the character in the novel she had most admired. While she was alive, I had wanted to hide them from my wife, not that she’d have cared. And after her death I had disposed of them among the “R” shelves of the Eisenhower Library, think
ing the subject closed.
I opened the envelope, and took out Rosenheim’s scribbled note: “I was disappointed with their responses to A Princess of Roumania. I was insulted by proxy, me to you. These students have no sympathy for failure, for lives destroyed just because the world is that way. They are so used to reading cause and effect, cause and effect, cause and effect, as if that were some kind of magic template for understanding. With what I’ve gone through this past year. . . . ”
I assumed he was referring to the painful breakup of his own marriage, which he’d mentioned in the bar. Here is an excerpt from the essay he was talking about:
The novel ends before the sexual status of Andromeda can be resolved. It ends before the confrontation between Miranda and the baroness, Nicola Ceausescu, her surrogate mother, though one assumes that will be covered in the sequels. And it ends before the lovers consummate their relationship, which we already know won’t last. Park’s ideas about love are too cynical, too “sad” to be convincing here, though the novel seems to want to turn that way, a frail shoot turning toward the sun. Similarly, the goal of the quest narrative, the great jewel, Kepler’s Eye (dug from the brain of the famous alchemist) is too ambiguous a symbol, representing enlightenment and blindness at the same time. . . .
The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2011 Edition Page 36
