All Those Vanished Engines (12 page)

She was studying for a masters in Public Health. But on Thursday evenings she took a writing class at Johns Hopkins. I thought I'd sign up for it, so that for one night at least I could admire her black hair and black eyebrows, her feral expression as she attacked an idea, the way she rolled her eyes if you said something dumb—my mother was a bit like her. I thought I'd like to take a writing class. I'd never taken one before. I thought I might learn something about tone and point of view.

Ben Burgis taught the class. When I first saw him he was sitting back in his chair, rubbing his palms along the front of his vest. Later, I had a desk in the same shared office. As it happened, the sunroom in my parents' house, where my father lay asleep, had similar high windows with a southwest exposure, and now the evening light came slanting in. Because of pulmonary fibrosis, his breathing was shallow. I could scarcely see his chest rise and fall. An edge of light cut across his face, and I realized I was wrong about the source for the engineer in my Mass MoCA story. I had thought I had borrowed him from a photographic image of the Dutch printmaker M. C. Escher. As a child I'd had a poster in my room, identical hands drawing each other, and each with a bracelet—no, a cuff link—on its wrist. Or maybe it was at a recent exhibition of the artist's moebius-strip designs that I had seen the blown-up portrait: sharp nose; stiff, white hair; and the sunken cheeks of the toothless. In profile, a disheveled old cockatoo. But my father had been there all along. Something in the light discovered him now.

“Hello,” said my sister plaintively. She came in from another room, the palms of her hands pressed together. “I wanted to ask something. But he is still asleep.”

“Yes.”

“Still asleep. Even though it is not bedtime.”

“No,” I said.

“Oh, I will wait.”

She stood over him, pressing her hands together. “Because old people are tired,” she explained.

“And forgetful.”

“Yes. Like he forgot to change the smoke-alarm battery, even though it has been six months.”

“That's all right. I'll help you with that.”

She glanced up at me, met my eyes for a single moment. “Are you reassuring me?”

“No.”

“Or consoling me?” Since our mother's death, Elly was always on the lookout for hidden reassurances or consolations, which had the unintended consequence of making her more anxious. At all times she perched on a thin edge of anxiety.

In our Thursday-night fiction-writing class, I had liked to watch Nicola as she set out to antagonize. “I don't believe this for a minute,” she would say. “This whole scene.”

“It's the way it happened.”

“Even so. And who is this woman? Why does she have to be a writer, of all things? Is she, like, supposed to be you? That's so boring.”

I enjoyed these conflicts. A year later, Nicola was pregnant, and I had taken over Ben Burgis's courses at Johns Hopkins. In a peculiar reversal, he had signed up for my class on the structure of the novel. I believe he had some independent money, and in any case he claimed he had a story to tell, based on his own experience. He brought his friend Traci to the class, an older, gray-haired woman.

She was interesting to me. I had her write a synopsis, then break it down into a series of scenes, each one summarized in a paragraph. This preliminary sketch had gotten more and more complicated, and now included sample chapters. I'd brought the latest iteration with me up to Williamstown.

My father lay on his back, snoring on the wicker couch. “I don't like it to be reassured,” my sister said.

“Elly—just relax. Easy breaths.”

“Are you reassuring me?”

Sometimes I thought maybe my sister and my father could stay in the house if I brought someone else in, a professional caregiver, perhaps. Or else if my father went into the nursing home, Elly could move into an apartment or a group home.

She was rocking back and forth, shifting her weight from one foot to the other as she hovered over the couch. “No reason to wake him,” I said. “Don't worry. I'll come down in a minute and fix supper.”

I didn't want to move my father to the Commons less than a year after my mother had died there. Because the decision was so hard, it had come as a relief to think about the museum opening. Now that was over, and I needed something else to distract myself, a third reason I had come from Baltimore, something that had to do with my mother's memory, something I hadn't mentioned to Nicola. So: the future, the present, and the past. Or else truth, memory, and imagination. As I climbed the stairs, I thought about the power plant, the three silent structures in a line, and the forest of condensation tubes leading to the boilers and then up to the big tank. I walked along a low corridor to the back of the house, where my mother had her study in a room that had once been mine. Though small, it still had a little bed in it. I'd slept there the last few nights.

In my mother's file cabinets I had found the papers I'd described to Nicola on the phone. And I'd found notes and early drafts of her two books about Elly, as well as scholarly and pseudo-scholarly articles. And all her student evaluation forms from all those years. I discovered that she hadn't always been a successful teacher. “I feel like you play favorites,” someone had said. “I feel like you always favor the boys.”

Traci's latest sketch started like this: a chapter about an obnoxious and frantic woman in her forties, with long curly hair, shining eyes, and an infant son from a loveless marriage. All day she was attentive and responsible, but after midnight she took him out asleep to her expensive car, buckled him into his car seat, and drove through the ice and snow to a deserted Kmart parking lot, where she accelerated recklessly and expertly in a series of sliding figure eights until the boy screamed.

Sitting on the floor of my mother's study, I thought about the subsequent chapters as the story moved back in time to when the woman was nineteen, and she got to know a student at a college in Massachusetts. In Traci's words:

He had the brutal look I'd wanted all my life. I first saw him on TV, a game show where they matched up college teams, and he knew everything and didn't look like he cared about any of it. “Plantagenet,” he sneered in answer to some question. He sounded like he'd gone to prep school with the Plantagenets and didn't think much of them, or else had secret, personal reasons for despising them, which he was too proud to reveal.

The thing is, I recognized this student, or thought I did. One night I had sat in my parents' kitchen watching Jack Shoots on our eight-inch black-and-white. Boyish and smiling, he had answered question after question. My mother sat beside me with an odd, dismissive look on her face.

Everybody else was frantic as a hummingbird, but he hit the buzzer every time. Afterward Diane dared me to write him a fan letter. She dared me to send him a pair of underpants, which I did. A really lacy pair. They weren't mine, though. I stole them from her drawer.

This was the beginning of the end for Traci's stupid heroine. By the sixth chapter she was begging for mercy; she was no match for Jack Shoots. The day he got her letter he borrowed a car and drove down to Hollins University in Virginia, where she was a sophomore. Soon he was sleeping with her, and with Diane too. But what made him irresistible was more than just his appetite. Later, Traci found she had no love for anyone ever for the rest of her life, not even her husband or son when they came along.

All this was many years ago. But it was clear in her memory, how he'd lie in bed and talk about other women, not out of cruelty. There's nothing cruel about a vampire or a parasite, she said. He wasn't gloating or boasting. He was telling the truth.

In the margin of her sketch, I had contested her assertion about vampires, and enclosed a jpeg of Nosferatu devouring a child. And of course there were vampires in the Forgotten Realms, where
The Rose of Sarifal
was set, and no one had a good word to say about them. But in addition I had emailed more substantive comments: I didn't believe that the relationship she described, no matter how destructive, had so completely altered the trajectory of her character's life. She had only known this man about six months, and now here she was, still pathetic after thirty years. I said I didn't mind if these scenes with Jason Hall (as she called him in the text) served as the condensed or crystallized form of some larger dynamic, which might involve some other trauma that might interest me. In other words, I suggested he might be a symptom rather than a cause.

“You're not my shrink,” she'd emailed back.

But it was a matter of credibility. In my mother's files I was looking for a poem she had written for the
American Scholar
. I sat cross-legged on the red Kashmiri rug, which my father had brought back from one of his trips. I pulled out the metal drawer, searching for the poem in the files of miscellaneous clippings, mostly columns and book reviews. It was called “A Mind of Winter: for our students.” Here is part of it:

We grow cool, we grow cool.

Texts complete, lessons mastered,

Lust and rage so well unlearned,

Plato's ladder so high mounted,

Gains consolidated, counted,

Idiot yearnings long unyearned.

While deep beneath, or far below,

At the foot, or under snow,

Gentle the attending young,

Beautiful, solicitous,

Unconsciously generous,

Assert the snow but show the spring.

As I was reading, Elly came and stood above me in the doorframe, rubbing her hands together. “Oh, he is still sleeping. Shall I wake him?”

“No, let him sleep. I'll come down and help you.”

This did not mollify her. “Oh, oh, it's me again,” she said softly, a phrase I'd often heard her use when she suspected, or else my mother had explained, that her problems were of her own making. She sounded close to tears, and in the fading light I got up to help her with the small tasks she'd had in mind. It wouldn't do any good, though. I was returning to Baltimore in two days.

One of the interesting things about autistic people is the insight they provide into ourselves. We all have strategies to distract ourselves from what we cannot bear. Memory, for example, serves such a function. This is how I got my first teaching job: at the end of the short-story class that Nicola and I had taken that first fall semester, Ben Burgis asked to talk to me. He was worried because he'd been assigned to teach a course in novel writing. I'd just finished a book, and I said I'd help him out. In January he came over to the apartment on North Calvert Street to ask what he should do for the first class, which was in a couple of days. “Please,” he said, “could you just start us off?”

So I came in to meet his students. He didn't introduce me or himself, but just sat with the others around the table, taking notes. At the end he waited until everyone had eft, and asked me what I was going to do for the next class.

After a month he stopped coming. I asked him, “Are you getting paid for this?”

“Don't worry. I'll just sign the checks over.”

After spring break, Nicola told me that if I was teaching in a college, I should be able to claim credit. It might come in handy. I asked Ben Burgis about this, and he thought it was a terrible idea. But I pressed the issue, and he agreed to meet me at the dean's office, where I'd made an appointment to discuss the arrangement. I think he was a little drunk when he showed up on his motorcycle outside Gilman Hall, though it was only ten in the morning.

The dean turned out to be one of those minor characters from fiction and real life, who shows his actual feelings in every gesture and expression. At first he knitted his brows, unsure of what we were trying to tell him. Then his jaw dropped. Finally, flame burst from his ears—I've never seen anyone so angry, outside of a cartoon. He leapt up from his chair with such force, a star-shaped hole appeared in the ceiling above him. He chased Ben Burgis out the door. Then he turned toward me, shoulders hunched, fingers twitching and outstretched. The air darkened around him. “You,” he said, “I don't even know who you are. This is Johns Hopkins. Not some clown college.”

A year later I had taken over the rest of Ben Burgis's courses. I was reading Traci's story, and if you were a certain type of persons—different from Nicola, for example—it might have been possible to detect the faltering, senescent hand of Providence in what had now occurred.

Once, in bed with Traci's heroine, Jason Hall had started talking about an English teacher at his college. He had gotten in close with her family, and was often at her house. She taught Dante, and Milton, and Expository Writing. She was also, Jason explained, delicate and vulnerable, with a husband who taught physics and often left her alone with her autistic child while he traveled the world. And despite her intellect and accomplishments, Jason Hall thought he could detect similarities between her and that same daughter, who had become in his eyes a figure of symbolic mystery, a ghost haunting the household, hovering in doorways, uttering from time to time a poignant, gnomic phrase.

“What was the professor's name?” I asked in one of our conferences. “You never say it in the text.”

When she told me, I feigned disbelief. “Am I supposed to take this personally?”

“Don't flatter yourself,” she said. “This is nothing about you.”

We had already established that the novel was based on events in Traci's actual life. “People will think she is Korean,” I said. “Of course the description is filtered through Jason Hall—I'm hoping that's a pseudonym, by the way. It's interesting, what he chose to tell you. He was probably lying about her name.”