Blind Sight (6 page)

“Where are the girls?” asks Caroline, looking around the room, as if just now noticing their absence.

“Joyce has them doing a puzzle,” says Pauline. “I’ll go get them.”

“Mother is never as happy as when she discovers a legitimate reason to leave a room,” says Nancy, after Pauline has left the room.

Nancy walks over to the pink and white cradle and peers down at its contents. “Do we have a name for the progeny? You were expecting a girl, of course.”

Sara glances at a homemade sign scotch-taped to the wall over the cradle. A sign that had once said “Welcome to the World, Leila” and which had had to be altered by Joyce and a pair of scissors.

“I always thought that’s why you smoked,” says Caroline to Nancy, or rather, in the direction of Nancy. “You wanted a reason to leave a room.”

Now the children run in: small Aurora, smaller Pearl. Pauline behind them, steering Pearl by the shoulders.

“Careful,” says Pauline to Aurora, who is attempting to climb the bed.

“I know,” says Aurora, working her toes into the space between box spring and mattress and hoisting herself upwards. Very carefully, Aurora puts her arms around her mother. Sara pats her daughter’s
back. “You have a baby brother!” she had told the girls when they were brought to the hospital room. “Are you mad, Mommy?” Aurora had asked.

Pearl stands at the foot of the bed and starts kicking it, not so hard as to be reprimanded, but hard enough to make her presence known.

Joyce comes into the room, carrying a camera.

“Oh, let’s get out Baby,” says Aurora. “And make a picture.”

Joyce presses the shutter of the camera before everyone can get organized. People complain. “Take another one,” they tell her. “When we’re ready.”

Luke is sweating. He deletes the last section of his writing from his computer.

“Whatever,” Luke says to himself. “Whateverwhateverwhatever.”

Luke feels that he has been very accurate in imagining the conscious and subconscious feelings of his mother. So accurate that it doesn’t feel to Luke like imagination, and he experiences a keen sense of betrayal by his mother’s Moments Before, by her mantra, by the effort it took her to accept him.

“But it doesn’t matter,” he tells himself. “Even if it is real.”

Luke kicks off his shoes and does a handstand against the wall. He considers the nature of consciousness and the problems of other minds. He thinks that this might be something he could study more in college and he projects an image of himself engaging in serious intellectual debates over coffee, an image constructed out of other images: a visit to Pearl’s dorm room, movies, dialogue from books.

It is not difficult, even for Luke, still inverted, to see why natural selection would favor an organism that recognized not only its own mind, but other minds as well: while Caveman Fug is showing his dwelling to Caveman Oog, he senses that Caveman Oog is envying the square footage of his dwelling. Caveman Fug then assumes a
defensive posture or, possibly, deliberately depreciates his dwelling by pointing out the mildew and bat guano. Caveman Oog is appeased, and Caveman Fug lives long enough to pass on his genes. Imagination in this sense is useful for a complex organism that needs to defend itself from members of its own species. However, somewhere along the way this elegant and useful design feature of the brain has run a little amok, creating the possibility of an organism that can imagine the subconscious feelings of others in such a way as to inflict useless pain upon itself, and then avoid facing this pain by standing on its hands and theorizing abstractly on the nature of consciousness.

Luke flips himself upright.

Mark will be home soon from the studio. Luke walks into the living room. He likes to be doing something, when Mark comes home, to show that he’s not an aimless teenager. He had planned on mowing his father’s lawn earlier today, but just as he had begun a text—
where lawnmower?
—a truck had pulled up in front of the house. Jorge and Dave. Mark has gardeners. So Luke had watched two more episodes of
The Last
instead, catching up on the second season, courtesy of Mark’s TiVo.

Luke now thinks through possibilities for the next hour: reading, more television, seeing what’s in Mark’s garage, jerking off, meditation. Luke examines the contents of the refrigerator. Everything, Luke has learned, is delivered premade, from Whole Foods. Tonight the plan is to grill on the brand-new grill: a pre-marinated steak for Mark, already cut-up and seasoned vegetables for Luke.

Luke prints out the beginning part of his Moment Before essay on Mark’s printer, and leaves the writing, along with the photographs, on Mark’s desk. When his father comes home, Luke is outside, studying the instruction manual he found on top of the grill. Mark puts him in charge of dinner and Luke is glad to have a task to complete for his father. They eat outside on the patio, Mark praising Luke’s skill. After dinner they watch
Heaven Can Wait
, on DVD, which Mark
has said is one of his favorite movies. They sprawl in separate leather chairs, but share the leather ottoman. During humorous scenes they laugh, turning to see if the other is also laughing.

Mark and Luke’s bare feet bump each other when they laugh. Mark’s second toe is longer than the first. So is Luke’s. Luke notices this and all the rumbling Moments Before of his day vanish with a soundless snap in the joy of this discovered fact. Luke involuntarily makes a sound, somewhere between “Hey!” and “Oh!” Mark, watching the movie, laughs. Their feet bump.

“I know,” Mark says. “I love this part.”

M
y father’s gym is on the top floor of an office building in Beverly Hills. When you pull into the parking structure, the valet attendant asks if you would like the car washed while you are visiting.

“Yeah, it’s sort of a funny place,” Mark explained to me the first time we went together. “But you have to be careful about where you work out in public. You can’t have some idiot taking a picture of you with his phone while you’re in the shower and posting it on the Internet.”

Exclusive or not, I think that people must still be nervous about this at my father’s gym because so far I’ve always had the entire changing room, shower, and steam room to myself.

I was intimidated, the first time we went together. I’m an athlete, but I’m not a “jock.” At school, jocks are the guys who play lacrosse. I considered going out for lacrosse freshman year, but my sisters were against it.

“Only two kinds of guys play lacrosse,” Pearl said. “Total douche bags and guys named Chad.”

“So that leaves me out,” I said.

“Well, you’re definitely not a total douche,” said Aurora. “But you should know that all Chads are not necessarily named Chad.”

“Yeah,” said Pearl. “A Chad is basically a decent-seeming guy, not cruel or an asshole. Technically, he never really does anything bad. He’s usually pretty hot, too. But he actually has no soul. He is just imitating human behavior. He has no imagination. No real morality. I think you know what I’m talking about.”

“Someone like Lee Wedman?” I asked.

“Lee Wedman is a total Chad,” said Pearl.

So I joined the cross-country team. I’m also in the Archery Club.

We began our workout today by running side by side on the treadmills.

“So I read your essay,” Mark said. “What a trip. I love all your descriptions. I love how your aunt has a fake English accent.”

We talked about that for a little bit, and then just ran some more.

“So you think your mom was expecting you to be a girl?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I explained to him about Abigail Perkins and the legions of sisters, and Paul becoming Deepak.

“What a trip,” he said again. “That’s a lot of women. What about your grandfather? Nana’s husband?”

“Dead for a long time,” I said. “Blood clot.”

Across the row of machines, I could see our reflections in the mirrors that line the gym walls. We don’t look that much alike, although he says he used to be skinny like me. We are both left-handed, though, which no one else in my family is. We both have curly hair, although his is darker. We have the long-second-toe thing. Right now at least, I’m my father’s son only at the extremities.

“So you think your mom, uh, got together with me because she really wanted a third daughter?” Mark asked. “Like it was a plan?”

“She’s never said that,” I told him. “I think it was more of a subconscious thing. But it makes sense if you put it all together.”

“It wasn’t a sleazy thing, you know,” Mark said. “I really wasn’t that kind of guy. And she was definitely not that kind of … it wasn’t like some sort of seduction thing. I wanted to be with her. She wasn’t bullshitting you when she said it was special.”

“No, I know,” I said. “She explained it all. Things just happen, you know?”

“There’s usually more than one reason,” he agreed. “How come she never got married again? She was really beautiful.”

“I don’t know. There’s not really a whole lot of people in Delaware on her level. But she always says that she’s happy in her friendships.”

“Yeah, I get that. Hey, you’re a really good writer.”

“Thanks.” I know I’m not a really good writer, but it was nice of him to say that. I wonder if anyone in the past seventeen years has said something to Mark like “You’d make a really good dad,” or “Do you want to have kids someday?” I wonder what he thought of when that happened, if it happened.

“Hey Dad,” I said.

“Yes, son.”

Saying “dad” and “son” in funny voices is becoming a thing for us.

“You came and saw me after I was born, right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I did.”

“So … what was that like? I mean, do you remember it?”

“Yeah, I remember it. Of course. To be honest, I was pretty freaked out.

“It was sort of a weird time in my life,” he explained. “I didn’t know how to handle it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t blame you.” I had imagined him freaked out. That seemed reasonable. I don’t know why it was a little disappointing to hear him actually say it.

“I really,” Mark looked at me. “I mean … I’m really glad you’re here, Luke. In Los Angeles. But also, you know,
here
.”

“Me too,” I said.

“Anytime you feel like letting me read something, that’s cool.”

“It’s pretty unorganized stuff at this point,” I told him. “But, yeah, if you’re interested, great.”

“I’m totally interested. And thanks for bringing those pictures. I kept trying to picture you in Delaware but it was hard because I have no idea what Delaware looks like.”

“No one does. People who drive through it don’t even know that’s what happened.”

“Ha-ha. Well, it looks like a great place to grow up.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, son,” Mark said, in a deep booming voice, clapping me on the shoulder. “Let’s get off these machines and later I’ll show you how to shave.”

Then he worked out with his personal trainer, and I did some free weights and sit-ups and pull-ups and stuff and then went back to the treadmill for more running. He still wasn’t done so I hung out in the empty steam room and then sat in the empty Jacuzzi. I thought about what Mark said, and what he might be thinking about my life in Delaware, and what my family sounds like to him.

My family moved from New York City to Delaware when I was four, Pearl was almost six, and Aurora was seven. Sara told us that we were all going to live with Nana and where Nana lived there would be “space” and “nature,” and we would be able to “greet the stars at night.” Nana had a house with three floors and a yard. She had a dog. We would all have bikes. It was going to be beautiful.

Up until then, we had lived in the apartment that Sara and her husband Paul had lived in. Paul, of course, was gone. Pearl doesn’t have any memories of him. Aurora says she remembers crawling under the dinner table in the New York apartment and playing with a man’s shoes and of a man swinging her by the ankles, but she thinks these memories may be apocryphal.

“I did meet the Paul person, briefly,” Aunt Nancy told me once, “coming through New York, just after Aurora was born. I must say
the flat made rather more of an impression than the man. Well, I mean, really, four bedrooms on the Upper East Side. Upholstered walls. Quite gorgeous Chippendale furniture shoved into the corners, and your mother and her Jewish yogi making everyone sit on cushions. Carrying Aurora from room to room in some sort of Mexican basket affair. It was extraordinary. Mad, really.”

Paul left us the apartment in New York City, because part of his transformation was to leave behind all the worldly trappings of his life as Paul in order to fully embrace his life as Deepak, and he would have no need of things like sofas or end tables in the ashram.

The problem was, those things weren’t really Paul’s to renounce because really they all belonged to Paul’s mother. Paul’s mother lived in Florida, because it was better for her health, so she didn’t mind, but Paul also had a brother named Barry.

Barry, it turns out, was a man who had very strong feelings. And one of those feelings was that the apartment should be his now. He didn’t choose to honor Paul’s final decision as Paul. He chose to have anger.

So Sara and Barry had been discussing this issue of the apartment for many years, and people like How-Is-Louis had helped us very much with people like Barry’s lawyer, and now everyone agreed that it was best that Barry should have the apartment back. And this was an extra-good thing because it had created this opportunity for us to go and live with Nana in Delaware, which would be beautiful. Nana lived alone in a big house that was definitely our family’s house, and no one else’s. Sara had grown up in it. Aunt Nancy and Aunt Caroline had grown up in it. We would grow up in it too. It was really too big a house for just Nana.

Nana’s husband, our grandfather Prescott, was dead, like I said, and had been since Sara was little. He had gone to Ecuador to preach the Good News with a missionary group. Unfortunately, upon landing in Ecuador, he became very ill and died as a result of a blood clot in his leg, before ever converting a single Indian.

That was not quite the version I got initially, because it was my sisters who first told me about him.